WikiVitals: Unofficial Wikipedia Statistics
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008In the March 8th edition of The Economist this article appeared about Wikipedia. This section piqued my interest
Mr Lih and other inclusionists worry that [the current Wikipedia administration and bureaucracy] deters people from contributing to Wikipedia, and that the welcoming environment of Wikipedia’s early days is giving way to hostility and infighting. There is already some evidence that the growth rate of Wikipedia’s article-base is slowing. Unofficial data from October 2007 suggests that users’ activity on the site is falling, when measured by the number of times an article is edited and the number of edits per month. The official figures have not been gathered and made public for almost a year, perhaps because they reveal some unpleasant truths about Wikipedia’s health.
I thought ‘perhaps because they reveal some unpleasant truths about Wikipedia’s health’ was a possibly a bit strong, especially against the lack of any properly referenced statistics. Whilst the official statistics might not be regularly updated at the moment a full export of the Wikipedia is still available at regular intervals. As such it’s possible, given a bit of work parsing the data, to generate some unofficial statistics. So that’s what I set out to do.
The results are at wikivitals.newswall.org.uk, or read on for more information about how they were created.