On Sun, Oct 28, 2012 at 9:25 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod@mccme.ru> 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 isn't 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 women's sports in a country, and specific women's sports in a country.) [[Sport in Kiribati]] does not exist, nor does [[Women's 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.

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