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User:Alterego/By the numbers

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The Wikimedia Foundation has experienced an exciting amount of growth across all sectors, projects and time periods analyzed. This growth is attributed in part to more than 30 thousand users who register and begin contributing each month, and in part to the Foundation's commitment to meet increased popularity with increased capacity. Combined, community and commitment have made Wikipedia the #1 reference site.

According to Hitwise [1], an online measurement company, Wikipedia's share of all Internet traffic grew 618% between April of 2004 and 2005. This made the encyclopedia the second most trafficked reference site on the Internet, behind only Dictionary.com. Less than one month later, Alexa Internet recorded that Wikipedia had significantly passed Dicionary.com, making it the most visited reference site - a position it still holds [2].

Of those visitors, Hitwise reported that males and females were equally distributed, and that those in the 18-24 age group were the most likely to read and contribute. Further discovered was that visitors were referred primarily from search engines such as Google, and that, of all web sites, it was the 33rd most recommended by these search engines.

Later in May, Google increased the English Wikipedia's PageRank to nine out of a possible ten, recognizing it as one of the most trusted web sites overall. This brought on a great flurry of indexing as Google steadily increased the number of Wikipedia's pages indexed from just under 3 million, to over 20 million in July.

Several specific articles were considered important by Yahoo!, Google and MSN search, the most notable of which is for the keyword Pope John Paul II. When the new Pope was elected the effect on the servers was immediately apparant, with more than 2,100 requests being satisfied every second [3]. While this number was spectacular at the time, only two months later in July it is common to receive 2,500 requests per second.

File:Popedotting.png
International press and search engine referalls on the day of Pope Benedict XVI's election caused a dramatic spike in activity. Pope John Paul II, his predecessor, is featured right.

In order to keep up with increased demand from search engines and word-of-mouth, it has been necessary to greatly expand the server grid to locations in Florida, France and Amsterdam from 40 servers earlier in the year to what will soon be more than 100. All told, the Wikimedia grid currently uses 20 terabytes of bandwidth per month, has 260 gigahertz of processing power across all CPUs, 210 gigabytes of memory and nearly 16 terabytes of hard drive space. Across all languages and all projects, the capacity has been put to good use.

According to statistics compiled by Erik Zachte [4], nearly 500 million words have been contributed to all projects since 2001 across 1.8 million articles. This represents a growth of 10% per month. Within these texts there are more than 1.3 million hyperlinks to other websites on the Internet and 31 million links to other articles on Foundation projects. As reported by the Wikipedia Signpost [5], these numbers culminated in an important milestone being reached when, in late June, 100 different language Wikipedias had at least 100 articles.

Bibliography

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