On 10/13/07, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote:
Matthew Brown wrote:
However, I suspect the low-hanging fruit is
getting closer to being
exhausted. The topics that your average 15-25 year old computer nerd
in an English speaking country is likely to know about.
If these statistics are actually the beginning of a new trend (I don't
think that's a given), then I think that's probably a decent
explanation, though somewhat oversimplified. I think the really
low-hanging fruit that you describe was mostly exhausted long ago, and
what's reaching the tipping point (think logarithmic decay) is the
stuff that you don't know off the top of your head but you can easily
research on the web.
Oh yeah, I meant to add this but I got sidetracked. I think another
part of it is that a lot of the most popular articles are reaching or
have reached the limit of what a wiki process can produce. In that
sense the low-hanging fruit has become the hardest to reach. It's my
opinion, and it's a controversial one, that a wiki can't produce a
perfect article and at some point the amount of regression is going to
equal the amount of progress. If there were some way to get people to
stop wasting their time on articles at that stage and focus instead on
the Mzoli's Meats of the world I think there'd be plenty of growth
ahead.
Other people say the exact opposite though, that we should focus on
improving [[Islam]] and forget about [[Mzoli's Meats]]. And that's
probably what's going to happen for the near future.