[R] Size of R user base

[Gabor Grothendieck]

Philippe Grosjean <phgrosjean <at> sciviews.org> writes:
> We have also the activity in the R-help mailing list, which could be
> representative of the most active users, certainly. Does anyone have of
> figure of the number of messages in R-Help with time since its creation? (it
> is probably available somewhere, but I don't know where).



If you check the r-help archive for last month

https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2004-March/date.html

at CRAN it says at the top there were 1949 messages for March.

Looking at

	https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/ 

it shows the Gzip's size of each month's archives and from that 
March had 886 KB of Gzip's text from which we can estimate 1949/886
= 2.2 messages per KB.  Over the last number of months there were
the following number of G'zipped KB for successive months over the
last 84 months:

55  19  19  18  19  17  35  27  47  55  32  50  55  41  49  50  28  53  42
81  54  99  60  84  80  76  75  78  61  83  97 141 122  96 144 173 153 226
202 131 165 183 175 168 187 240 272 262 195 236 244 285 249 326 345 392 268
455 320 418 453 468 422 447 400 323 516 478 327 450 487 535 658 573 606 659
543 655 722 677 567 519 703 886

where the last point 886KB is March 2004.  Summing those number and
using 2.2 messages per KB gives an estimate of about 50,000 messages 
over that period of time.

Fitting a log linear model to those numbers gives:

	log(KB) = 3.2 + .043 i

where i is the month number which indicates that the archive size
(and hence the number of messages and possibly the user base) is
growing at 4% per month!

P.S.  The following web page gives the number of messages per day over
the last few days as a graph:

	http://gmane.org/info.php?group=gmane.comp.lang.r.general