Thanks for taking the time to ask this question. Allen, brought up this point when he posted here.

Allow me to shed some light on how we estimated the total number of installations.

* There have been just over 50,000 installations of hosted Deki Wikis on our site and two others that are hosted by partners.

* Downloads at Sourceforge are over 55,000 now with over 700 downloads each day. We only began tracking all our downloads at Sourceforge as of June. Prior to that we conservatively estimate we had 10,000 downloads.

* Not included in this estimate are SVN code repo check outs and several other sites like Download.com that have long offered downloads of Deki Wiki.

Finally, we made installing Deki Wiki super easy by packaging it up as a VMware certified image. So, installation takes just over 5 minutes (not counting download time). Check it out: http://mindtouch.com/Deki_Wiki

I have spoken personally with a lot of our users and I’m confident we’ve achieved 100k installs or I wouldn’t feel comfortable making this claim. For example, if you read the press release we made the claim that Deki Wiki is being downloaded 500 times a day. Actually if you look at just the Sourceforge.net stats you’ll see Deki Wiki is actually being downloaded over 700 times a day. We included a very conservative estimate in the announcement, we don’t want to over-hyping things.

As for other wikis, take a look for yourself. They almost all publish their numbers. Others that don’t I’ve spoken with personally. Some of these other wiki companies’ stats can even be viewed at Sourceforge.net.

Personally, I think the fact that our software, which is a pretty big download, is downloaded more than 700 times a day is pretty amazing. The barrier to entry in downloading a 230MB file is significantly greater than a 10 second registration form. Also, I personally speak with as many downloaders as possible. As I said before, I’m confident our estimate is conservative.

Again, thanks for taking the time to post and checking out MindTouch