QUOTE(One @ Wed 18th March 2009, 10:59am)
I like the analogy to velocity for a compared analogy to acceleration.
If you take this graph and divide by the number of articles graph, it would indicate less edits per article on average as the base expands.
I think this is an interesting point. In fact, what might be interesting is a min/max/mean/average of edits/time/article (mean or average edits per unit time for the mean or average articles).
I suspect that Wikipedia expends many of its edits accomplishing a whole lot of nothin' on a small number of controversial articles, more of its edits accomplishing nothing on sundry fancruft articles, and comparatively little time (low mean edits/time) for the vast majority of articles. One's suggested analysis, or something similar, would point this out.
One way to articulate this is that in a
Real Encyclopedia, unlike Wikipedia,
all articles will be maintained on some schedule. The article on (e.g.)
Abbeyhill railway station (T-H-L-K-D) needing perhaps less attention than
Palestine (T-H-L-K-D), it will nonetheless get
some attention regularly. In Wikipedia, an article that one might expect to be relatively stable such as (e.g.)
Anti-Defamation League (T-H-L-K-D) gets the snot pounded out of it, while after 9 months (and 500 revisions of mostly vandalism and reversion),
Central Processing Unit is essentially unchanged.