English Wikipedia just scored “three million articles”, so I thought I’d give some more numbers and perspectives :) Four years ago we observed impressive +50% traffic spike on Wikipedia – people came in to read about the new pope. Back then it was probably twenty additional page views a second, and we were quite happy to sustain that additional load :)

Nowadays big media events can cause some troubles, but generally they don’t bring huge traffic spikes anymore. Say, Michael Jackson’s English Wikipedia article had peak hour of one million page views (2009-06-25 23:00-24:00) – and that was merely 10% increase on one of our projects (English Wikipedia got 10.4m pageviews that hour). Our problems back then were caused by complexity of page content – and costs got inflated because of lack of rendering farm concurrency control.

Other interesting sources of attention are custom Google logos leading to search results leading to Wikipedia (of course!). Last ones, for Perseids or Hans Christian Ørsted sent over 1.5m daily visitors each – but thats mere 20 article views a second or so.

What makes those spikes boring nowadays is simply the length of long-tail. Our projects serve over five million different articles over the course of an hour (and 20m article views) – around 3.5m articles are opened just once. If our job would be serving just hot news, our cluster setup and software infrastructure would be very very very different – and now we have to accommodate millions of articles, that aren’t just stored in archives, but also are constantly read, even if once an hour (and daily hot set is much larger too).

All this viewership data is available in raw form, as well as nice visualizations at trendingtopics, wikirank and stats.grok.se. It is amazing to hear about all the research that is built on this kind of data, and I guess it needs some improved interfaces and APIs already for all the future uses ;-)

Tomorrow voting for Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Election starts – and Yours truly is a candidate.

You can find most of my views on various issues in our question pages (I was somewhat boiling when answering the What will you do about the WMF mishandling it’s funding? one – it probably takes great effort to phrase such a bad question, and so easy to answer it :), as well as Wikipedia Signpost ‘interview’.

I was appointed to the Board back in January 2008, after holding various other volunteer (at some point in time – ‘officer’) positions within the organization since 2004 – and brought in the core technology and operational efficiency skill set there. The appointment was supposed to be somewhat temporary, but board restructure appeared to be much longer process than we expected – both the chapters part, and nomination committee work. As a community member, after the restructure I was in ‘community-elected’ seat, though I never participated in any election – so that wasn’t too fair to the actual community, need to fix that :)

So, even though I wasn’t too visible to actual community (people would notice me mostly when things go wrong, and I’m not in best mood then, usually :-), I feel that the values I’ve worked on, evangelized and supported for all these years – efficiency and general availability of our projects – can win mindshare not only of our read-only users I work mostly for, but also eligible voters.

And I do think, that internal technology expertise has to be represented on board, as things we’ve been doing, and methods we’ve been using, are very much unique in the technology world. Oh, and somewhere I mentioned, our technology spending is close to 50%, that has to be represented too :-)

That happened long before Wikipedia. I loved Encarta. Well, before Encarta, I used to read this thing a lot:

But then Encarta arrived and I loved it. It did fit into single CD and didn’t take too much space on disk. I could look up all these articles in it, without having to use expensive dialup, fast. I remember my school buddies coming over and watching those tiny movies in it. I could rip it off for my school works, and look incredibly smart (now people rip off Wikipedia and don’t get too much credit for that :).

It is dead.

People on the interwebs suggest that employees at Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica will be throwing parties tonight. Oh well, Wikipedia is already up to date about this. Every encyclopedia out there was an inspiration for Wikipedia, more so than any technology or “web-two-oh” hype. There’s not much joy seeing good things die.

Ten years ago I imagined, that once I have my own home, I’ll have a place to put a full set of dead-tree Britannica, like my parents had “Lithuanian soviet encyclopaedia”. Wikipedia changed my plans (now there’re two flat panels staring at Wiki, inside and outside), but it seems it already is changing the world around it way more. RIP Encarta. You were inspiring, and really too young to die. If it was us, we didn’t mean it, really. By the way, that content of yours, I’d be glad to see it free. *wink*