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Statistical gluttonyeditBy Alterego
The Wikimedia Foundation has experienced an exciting amount of growth across all projects. The growth is attributed in part to more the more than three thousand users who register to contribute per month, and in part to the Foundation’s commitment to meet increased popularity with increased capacity. Wikipedia in particular has experienced a dramatic rise in publishing, with English Wikipedians creating more than 1,250 new articles every day at a 7% monthly increase. With more than 650,000 articles, the trend indicates that as the overall corpus grows, so too does the percent of new articles created in relation to it.  In the German language, Wikipedianer have been busy too, writing articles at a clip of 6% per month. As the total number of words grows at 8% per month, the depth of information increases in proportion to the breadth. According to Jakob Voss, a member of the German board, 20% of all German articles are focused on biographies of people. Speakers of nearly 200 languages have come together in Wikipedia communities, resulting in similar - sometimes never-before-seen - linguistic phenomena. According to the Wikipedia Signpost, more than 100 different language Wikipedias each have more than 100 articles. With some of the languages being quite obscure, this may be the first time their culture has had a compendium of information such as an encyclopedia.Most popular article for each top 10 wiki entering June
Over all languages, there is a 10% growth of new articles per month, totaling 1.8 million at present. Between these articles there are 500 million words, 30 million inter-wiki links and 1.3 million links to other websites. These were contributed between 30 million edits by 60,000 registered, and many more anonymous users. Having so much quality content freely available has made Wikipedia an attractive destination for visitors. According to data donated to the Foundation by Hitwise, the Wikipedia.org domain surpassed Dictionary.com as the most popular reference site in late May. This followed a 618% increase in share among traffic from all websites in the previous year. In the two months following the milestone, Wikipedia strengthened its lead by more than 25%, increasing its share of traffic to all reference sites by an additional 92%. Search engines have increasingly recognized the encyclopedia’s value to visitors, sending 66% of all incoming traffic. Google, in particular, sends 50% of this traffic, taking an overall share of 33%. In late May, Google briefly increased the English Wikipedia’s PageRank ™ to 9 out of a possible 10, formally recognizing it as one the most trusted websites. This culminated in a great flurry of spidering as Google went from having 3 million Wikipedia pages indexed in March to more than 25 million in July. Pages from the Wikipedia.org domain currently occupy .32% of all pages in Google’s index, a number that synchs closely to the .20% of all search engine traffic that Wikipedia attracts. Wikipedia is now the 22nd most recommended site by search engines, and the gap continues to widen.  Having been established as a primary source of papal news, when Pope Benedict XVI was elected an article was created instantly and received over 2,400 edits in its first day. It was then cited heavily by blogs and news sources such as Reuters, causing a large influx of traffic, peaking at 2,100 requests per second. While this number was spectacular at the time, only two months later it is common to receive over 2,500 requests per second. As increased and better content attracts more users, who in turn expend more server resources, it has been necessary to greatly expand the Wikimedia server grid to several locations in Florida, France, Amsterdam and soon, South Korea. As increased capacity is also a factor in attracting new visitors, these numbers can be expected to increase significantly.
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Wikimedia Research Networkedit
by Cormaggio The Wikimedia Research Network is a network of people interested in the development and improvement of Wikimedia's project needs and processes; a sort of long-term planning and steering group. It began in May 2005 with the provision of new roles outlined by Jimmy Wales in a letter to the foundation-l mailing list [1], one of which was Chief Research Officer, which was filled by Erik Möller. Erik then created the Network [2] (originally called the Wikimedia Research Team), and invited anyone interested to get involved and list their individual interests. These interests are quite diverse, spanning technical, legal, and sociological fields, and projects to reflect and focus these fields are underway. These include issues pertaining to unified single login, article validation, collaboration with universities, and a general user survey to test the "state of the wiki", or rather the various wikis. A privacy policy is also being drafted. There have been three full meetings of the network so far, taking place on IRC, for which full logs are available. They have normally at some point in the meeting split between technical and sociological issues to give a better focus to people with those interests. As evidenced by the Meta research page, there are many individuals doing research into some aspect of Wikimedia's work, mostly Wikipedia, and the WRN is a chance for people to work together on these ideas. However, the Research Network has come under criticism for potentially stifling these individual projects - though Erik Möller was adamant in setting it up that individuals collaborating on a particular research project would get full credit for their work. Wikimania 2005 was a great opportunity for people to brainstorm and share ideas for projects, many of which have yet to blossom. The WRN is currently without a central co-ordinator, following Erik Möller's resignation from his role as Chief Research Officer as well as mainly from all other Wikimedia projects. This does not mean, however, that its work is not continuing, but it has given the opportunity for a further reflection on its goals and role in the community, as much as it needs to be done for the CRO position itself. Whatever the current situation, it will certainly be an exciting time to do research into Wikimedia projects as they continue to increase in size and complexity. Of course, any ideas on existing or future projects are always welcome, which you can do on the WRN main page or its talk page.
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