Dramatic increase in traffic and contributions to the FamilySearch Wiki

Three days ago, on 19 January 2011, I wrote a post and cited then current number of page views for the FamilySearch.org Wiki. On Wednesday evening the number stood at 213,190,629 according to the counter on the bottom of the main page. Today, 23 January 2011, the number is 215,668,862. This means that 2,478,233 people had visited the site and that there are over 800,000 visits a day to just the start-up page of the Wiki! As a matter of fact, the number kept changing while I was trying to calculate the increase. In just one or two minutes the views went up over 110. As a result of the increased traffic, the number of articles is also dramatically increasing, the latest number, as I am writing this post, is 47,166 up about a hundred from yesterday.

To give some perspective, the Ancestry.com Wiki start-up page has been accessed of 674,446 times since its inception, less than one day's traffic on the FamilySearch Wiki.  On the other hand, if you need a reality check, the English language Wikipedia (they have articles in a huge number of other languages) has 3,539,387 articles. Even at 500 a week, the FamilySearch Wiki would take over 100 years to catch up with Wikipedia.

The FamilySearch Wiki is a collaborative project, anyone who registers can contribute and it certainly looks like a lot of people are taking that opportunity seriously. This will present a challenge to all those who are moderators and support people to the project. I would suggest that we are now in serious need of greater participation at a much higher level than we were even a week or a month ago. Please take the time to study the pages in the Wiki about moderators and support and see if you can lend a hand at maintaining this increasingly valuable resource.

By the way, while writing this very short article the number of times the start-up page of the Wiki was accessed rose to 215,678,551 or about 10,000 visits.