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CZ:Statistics

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Since its inception (Nov. 2006) and official launch (March 28, 2007), Citizendium has grown. This page provides statistics on Citizendium's output of articles and its contributor base.[1] Our meta-discussions take place on the forum, the relevant statistics page is here.


Pages

Number of articles and pages

The first graph shows the number of articles (technically speaking, all pages from mainspace, without redirects and subpages), including articles that are not "live."[2]

Fig. 1. Number of articles

The second graph shows number of all pages from all namespaces (e.g. userpages, talk pages and images are included, redirects are not). This is the green line. The blue line is the one from the first graph (i.e. the mainspace pages). What made the greeen line jump almost vertically mid February 2007? It was Saint Valentine's, when after slashdotting many new users registered and were welcomed on their talk pages. Notice that at the same time there was no parallel growth in the mainspace. Apparently, the newly registered users were mainly watching, since at that time there was no unregistered access. A more stable growth rate has been established after the launch.

Fig. 2. Number of all pages from all namespaces (green) and articles (blue).

Rate of article and page creation

The third and fourth figure present global creation rate. It measures the activity on the wiki expressed in new pages per day. The rate for "pure" articles (technically: mainspace without redirects) is depicted in blue; the green line corresponds to all pages (still, without redirects). This is calculated as the number of articles (pages, respectively) divided by the number of working days from the beginning. Obviously, this is a "global average", to be compared with a recent creation rate on the 5th graph of this section. It represents the creation rate for articles taking into account last 30 days only.

Fig. 3. Creation rate (articles per day)
Fig. 4. Overall creation rate in pages per day (green line); the blue line corresponds to articles' creation rate

Figure 5 indicates recent creation rate. But it needs special explanation. In the earliest months of the project, the Citizendium was a "fork" of Wikipedia, i.e., we had uploaded all Wikipedia articles. Then, in mid-January 2007, the project's participants decided to "unfork," that is to delete all articles that were not tagged "live" i.e. improved or meant to be improved soon here on CZ. If an article appears to be created before that moment it means that it survived the "Big Unfork" procedure and the 'creation' date is in fact that of its first revision on CZ. In other words, the growing rate before mid-January is not very meaningful as the rules then were different and putting a tag or just correcting a typo 'created' an article. In the mid-January the article creation statistic plummeted to four articles per day--which was probably a better indicator of the rate at which we were creating our own new content.

There was a spike in February 2007 because of a self-registration period and then again in April-May 2007 because of our public launch and the accompanying publicity. There was a spike in November 2007 for three reasons: a press release, a "Stub Week" initiative, and (especially) a very broadly-distributed call for participation made to persons with unused Citizendium accounts. December 2007 experienced a relative lull no doubt largely on account of the holidays.

Fig. 5. Recent creation rate (last 30 days counted)

Edits daily

The number of edits is highly variable from one day to another. More meaningful is the 30 days moving average[3] depicted below. Trends are easily visible. The price for readability is a little shift from the actual events: the changes on graph appear a few days after it happened. For example the impact of the launch that occurred in March 2007 can be observed here a bit later. The graph takes into account edits in all namespaces.

Fig. 5a. Edits by day, 30 days moving average.

Human resources

Number of authors

The following graphs describe the CZ human resources. These graphs need clarification, because in the months leading up to February 2006, all new authors had to create their own bios, and many new people did that and then nothing else. The Jan.-Feb. 2006 spike is due to a two-week period in which we allowed self-registration. There was also a spike that lasted from the end of March through May 2006, which corresponded to our public launch and the PR blitz that followed. The numbers from June 2006 on are perhaps a better indicator of long-term personnel trends on the wiki.

  • How many authors are active each month? The Fig. 6 presents the number of users that made at least one edit (separately for each month).


Fig. 6. Editing authors
  • How many users get more involved? Fig. 7. shows how many authors make at least 20 (at least 100, resp.) edits per month.


Fig. 7. Active authors

Daily contributors

How many contributors could you meet here daily, on average? While correlated with other human resources measures, this one seems to be interesting since it shows how many people make the community on a daily basis. See the figure below.


Fig. 8. Authors daily

New arrivals

Fig. 9: How many new authors arrive each month? This can be measured by counting new user pages. More substantial metric would be, however, to detect a new user on his first edit. Notice that in the period of self-registration (essentially, one week in January and two weeks in February 2007) the two metric largely coincide, as the new users were supposed to provide their bio. There was also a spike in March, which continued into April, due to our launch. New arrivals have been almost exclusively the result of press coverage, of which there has been relatively little over the summer, since our public launch. There were also fewer arrivals in the summer, probably due to the lower amount of academic activity generally.

Fig. 9. New arrivals


Word count

The table below is based on database dumps made about the end of every month. The following example explains its content.

As of end of July, 2007, Citizendium contained about 4100K words in its articles. We do not count the tables, nor "infoboxes". Technical information, as e.g. categories or http links are not counted. Draft pages are excluded. A typical article was about 562 words long. In fact, this is the median size, which means that, at the time, half of our articles were longer. There were about 3170 clusters.

A cluster means here the main article with a set of subpages describing given subject (this is the basic unit of Citizendium). The difference between the numbers shown here and the 16,949 total articles displayed on the Welcome Page is that the latter count includes neither external articles nor articles without metadata (which are typically lemma articles, i.e. containing just a short definition or description of the subject). Note also that for computing the median size only the main (or base) page of each cluster (without any subpages) is taken into account.


Date Total Words Words per day Clusters Cluster increase Median length in words
July, 2007 4100K N/A 3170 N/A 562
August, 2007 4415K 10.5K 3480 300 551
September, 2007 4577K 5.4K 3771 301 511
October, 2007 4889K 10.4K 4200 429 468
November, 2007 5297K 13.6K 5092 892 385 [4]
December, 2007 5603K 10.2K 5493 401 369
January, 2008 5914K 10.4K 6005 512 350
February, 2008 6165K 8.4K 6334 329 344
March, 2008 6484K 10.7K 6681 347 339
April, 2008 6963K 16K 7126 445 339
May, 2008 7744K 26K 7716 590 340
June, 2008 8042K 9.9K 8185 465 323
July, 2008[5] 8375K 11.1K 8711 526 319
August, 2008 8708K 11.1K 9238 527 315
September, 2008 8930K 7.4K 9673 435 308
October, 2008 9120K 6.3K 10042 369 301
November, 2008 9370K 8.3K 10543 501 291
December, 2008 9589K 7.3K 11007 464 283
January, 2009 9748K 5.3K 11239 232 283
February, 2009 9878K 4.3K 11628 389 275
March, 2009 10044K 5.5K 12035 407 265
April, 2009 10218K 5.8K 12265 230 266
May, 2009 10540K 10.7K 12706 441 264
June, 2009 10677K 4.6K 13137 431 258
July, 2009 10998K 10.7K 13789 652 245
August, 2009 11.238M 8K 14617 828 232
September, 2009 11.513M 9.2K 15176 559 224
October, 2009 11.730M 7.2K 15882 706 213
November, 2009 11.887M 5.2K 16687 805 198
December, 2009 12.013M 4.2K 17072 385 193
January, 2010 12.140M 4.2K 17750 678 184
February, 2010 12.286M 4.9K 18303 553 176
March, 2010 12.517M 7.7K 18994 691 169
April, 2010 12.684M 5.6K 20036 1042 155
May, 2010 12.808M 5.3K 20510 474 151
June, 2010 12.903M 3.1K 20792 282 149
July, 2010 13.012M 3.6K 21203 411 147
August, 2010 13.150M 4.6K 21743 540 146
September, 2010 13.245M 3.2K 22051 308 145
October, 2010 13.347M 3.4 K 22363 312 144
November, 2010 13.469M 4.1K 22821 458 140
December, 2010 13.544M 2.5 K 23050 229 140
January, 2011 13.662M 3.9 K 23310 260 140
February, 2011 13.731M 2.3 K 23497 187 139
March, 2011 13.803M 2.4K 23656 159 139
April, 2011 13.834M 1.0K 23826 170 138
May, 2011 13.875M 1.4K 23907 81 138
June, 2011 13.927M 1.7K 23967 60 138
July, 2011 13.945M 0.6K 24002 35 138
August, 2011 13.973M 0.9K 24053 51 138
September, 2011 13.993M 0.7K 24092 39 138
October, 2011 14.026M 1.1K 24162 70 138
November, 2011 14.051M 0.8K 24209 47 138
December, 2011 14.061M 0.3K 24239 30 138
January 2012 14.079M 0.5K 24265 26 138
February 2012 14.110M 1.0K 24298 33 138
March 2012 14.140M 1.0K 24332 34 138
April 2012 14.170M 1.0K 24365 33 138
May 2012 14.227M 1.9K 24419 54 138
June 2012 14.254M 0.9K 24447 28 138
July 2012 14.265M 0.4K 24463 16 138
August 2012 14.284M 0.6K 24472 9 138
September 2012 14.310M 0.8K 24502 30 139
October 2012 14.324M 0.5K 24537 35 139
November 2012 14.356M 1.1K 24582 45 139
December 2012 14.381M 0.8K 24609 27 139
January 2013 14.414M 1.1K 24642 33 139
February 2013 14.430M 0.5K 24664 22 139
March 2013 14.460M 1.0K 24693 29 140
April 2013 14.507M 1.6K 24719 26 140
May 2013 14.513M 0.2K 24731 12 140
June 2013 14.527M 0.5K 24744 13 140
July 2013 14.561M 1.1K 24767 23 141
August 2013 14.823M 8.7K 24769 2 141
September 2013 15.045M 7.4K 24806 37 140
October 2013 15.039M -0.2K 24800 -6 140
November 2013 15.048M 0.3K 24843 43 140
December 2013 15.071M 0.8K 24891 48 140
January 2014 15.088M 0.6K 24929 38 140
February 2014 15.101M 0.4K 24961 32 141
March 2014 15.109M 0.3K 25002 41 141
April 2014 15.119M 0.3K 25044 42 141
May 2014 15.128M 0.3K 25070 26 142
June 2014 15.143M 0.5K 25097 27 142
July 2014 15.152M 0.3K 25115 18 142
August 2014 15.154M 0.1K 25132 17 142
September 2014 15.194M 1.3K 25151 19 142
October 2014 15.200M 0.2K 25167 16 142

Structure of articles and workgroups

Checklisted articles

Recall that we categorize the articles as follows

  • External (imported and not yet improved)
  • Stubs (no more than few sentences)
  • Developing (beyond a stub but incomplete)
  • Developed (complete or nearly so)
  • Approved (that's it!)
Structure of articles.


And this is, approximately, how it evolved in time.


Evolutions of structure of articles.

Articles by workgroup

Articles by workgroups


...and how it came to this

Articles by workgroups, progress in time

Members by workgroup

Authors
Registered editors

Progress in time

Here we graph the number of articles in various workgroups vs. time.

Prog 1.png
Prog 2.png
Prog 3.png
Prog 4.png
Prog 5.png
Prog 6.png
Prog 7.png

Share button usage

See CZ:AddThis_Tracking_Statistics.

Notes

  1. The graphs have been produced using the publicly available data from the history of edits of all Citizendium pages. Concerning the comparison with the Wikipedia, the "stub-meta-history" dump files were used (see the appropriate subpages from this index).
  2. Here we do not count the subpages, but the clusters. We are working on a presentation taking the subpages into account.
  3. That is the average calculated for every day, taking into account the 29 preceding days.
  4. The high increase in clusters was no doubt due to this blog post.
  5. For technical reasons, numbers for July are determined as the mean between June and August


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