Number of TWiki Installations

This discussion started in TWikiPresentation2007x03x15.

-- Contributors: PeterThoeny - 17 Mar 2007

Discussion

Is there any number of the install base of TWiki? For now the only quantitative assertion is "Many installations, 12,000+ downloads/month". Do we have better numbers to estimate the size of the TWiki market? And if not, how can we get them?

-- MichaelDaum - 16 Mar 2007

Google:inurl:twiki/twikipreferences is a special Google search that returns one hit per TWiki. It currently lists about 20K public TWiki sites. Taking the TWikiInstallation directory as a proxy, I estimate at least a 2:1 ratio of behind firewall to public TWikis. That means around 60K to 80K TWiki installations overall. Each installation has 10 to 15K registered users. If we ballpark 100 users in average we have around 6-8M users.

-- PeterThoeny - 16 Mar 2007

Is the number of downloads -- 12,000+ per month -- including the TWiki release only or does it count any zip TWiki.org sends out?

Let's take the following factors into account when estimating the market size from google+downloads:

Do these numbers fit:

12,000+ TWiki downloads per month vs 60K installations, 20K visible

i.e. given how long TWiki is already available?

We can try to estimate these factors and answer that question more accurate, or simply try to measure competitors the same way and compare the numbers.

-- MichaelDaum - 17 Mar 2007

Regarding the google search Peter provided above: it does not seem to be really accurate. If you go through all the search result pages, it initially tops out at ~490 links. If you tell it to include all the similar links, you get up to ~1000. Among these, I notice that a lot are multiple revisions of the same pages. But even so, I don't know what google is pointing to for the other 18000 links it reports to have found because they don't show any way to see any more.

-- LynnwoodBrown - 17 Mar 2007

Google:inurl:view/twiki/twikipreferences is still more precise, but after accessing a couple of pages will give a Google error "your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application".

-- ArthurClemens - 17 Mar 2007

Some sites don't have the view in their urls anymore (short urls).

-- MichaelDaum - 18 Mar 2007

From the pages Arthur's inurl query does return, it looks to be doing a good job. 12,300 sites. So I changed it to main/twikiusers, and got a few less, but that let me see the HTML size of the TWikiUsers pages. A good rule of thumb is that 50k equates to roughly 50 users. The vast majority of page hit this way are < 50k; most are 8-10k. Of course I could only see three pages before google kicked me off

-- CrawfordCurrie - 18 Mar 2007

I've linked here from wikipedia's TWiki page, using the 60K figure for total no. of sites and Peter's 2:1 intranet:internet split to give a feel for how widely TWiki is installed. The estimate of no. of users is a bit harder to substantiate so I haven't included that.

I've also made a few other edits to that page.

-- RichardDonkin - 21 Mar 2007