Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/PlanetMath Exchange/Statistics

Now that a number of categories have now been completely reviewed, the following are some statistics on the articles from these categories.

Basic statistics

 * Last updated: 00:47, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC).

First, a few basic project statistics. Table 1 gives the total and unique article counts for PlanetMath's database, and the number reviewed and processed from the list so far. Also given are counts of the number of articles from the Wikipedia's Main namespace which use the templates Template:PlanetMath attribution (for copied/merged text), or Template:PlanetMath reference (for citing a PlanetMath article).).

The total value is a rough estimate, based on the number of unique objects in the PlanetMath database (reaching 4000 on or about 19 January 2005), plus an unknown number accounting for multiple appearances under the AMS classification system. The number of unique articles catalogued is assumed to be approximately the number of unique objects as of the time they were catalogued for this project in late January. The current number can be found at the bottom of this page.

Other counts were obtained from the summaries given on the project page, and from the What links here page for each of the project templates.

Statistics of article reviews

 * Last updated: 00:50, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC).

A more detailed breakdown of reviewed articles is given in Table 2. It gives counts and percentages for each of the classifications of the relationship between a PlanetMath article and its Wikipedia equivalent. These are drawn only from the categories with status reported on the main project page.

A bit of analysis
Initially, the proportion of more complete or adequate articles on Wikipedia was higher, accounting for about two thirds of the total number (based on the Adjusted % of Table 2). This may be due to the early tendency of participants to work through the smaller categories: Wikipedia might be said to have something on almost `everything', and so would be likely to have something on most topics for which PlanetMath has something.

However, as work progresses, and the participants delve into the larger categories, the greater level of detail found on PlanetMath becomes apparent. In certain topics, PlanetMath has a great deal of detail that Wikipedians appear to have eschewed in favour of greater breadth, until now. The proportion of more complete and adequate articles is now (23:10, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)) below 60%, and the proportion of reviewed PlanetMath articles with content to contribute is over 40%.

Caveats and disclaimer
We conclude with a few caveats. The current totals are progressive and may change significantly (both absolutely as counts and relatively as percentages) as the project continues. In particular, there has been significant bias early on in the project toward reviewing categories with few articles, and this may have an impact on the relative numbers of articles in each classification. It is difficult to assess how this bias (and other biases that may become apparent) may change the above statistics as time goes on.

Another misleading factor in the above numbers is that many articles that are more complete or adequate may have been edited slightly during processing, and hence these numbers are likely to underestimate the impact of PlanetMath on the Wikipedia. Another measure (still probably an underestimate) is the numbers of articles copying or citing PlanetMath content, given in Table 1, but this reflects only processed articles.

Finally, a disclaimer. This page is not intended to demonstrate that either of the sites is doing better or worse than the other; any conclusions you make one way or another are your own! Hopefully, however, these statistics will help to illuminate the status of both Wikipedia and PlanetMath, and the relationship between them, and to further encourage both.