On Sun, 28 Oct 2012 21:58:10 +1100, Laura Hale wrote:
On Sun, Oct 28, 2012 at 9:25 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter
wrote:
I believe there are two different issues. The
first is what is the
maximum possible number of articles (this is what I asked). For all
practical purposes (manpower we have, time until Wikipedia will
collapce and cease to exist, etc) we will only able to write a tiny
part of them. This is why media are discussing questions like
whether English Wikipedia will ever reach 5M articles. I think this
is a much more complex issue which has to do with the editor
retention dynamics and general lifetime of internet companies.
There is a lot of content missing. The maximum could actually be
quite great. There is a fair amount of material just not adequately
created to begin with. It isnt just new notable topics in terms of
politicians, sport competitors, sports team seasons, hurricanes,
elections, etc. that can grow. There are a huge fountain of
articles not created about these in pre-existing literature. Beyond
that, valid spin-off articles do not yet exist for many topics.
(Within my own framework, there are few articles on womens sports in
a
country, and specific womens sports in a country.) [[Sport in
Kiribati]] does not exist, nor does [[Womens sport in Kiribati]].
And this goes down... With the way English Wikipedia is structured,
you could have an endless variety of these as topics get more and
more
filled in.
Absolutely. As I mentioned, just today I created an article which
contains about 50 redlinks, and these redlinked articles are clearly
notable. The problem is that I currently seem to be the only editor on
English Wikipedia qualified to write these articles, and I am more busy
with other things, currently not available as well. I will probably not
be able to accomplish even what I am doing not until Wikipedia ceases to
exist or until I die, whatever comes earlier.
Cheers
Yaroslav