Considering a, you have this fine study by Emijrp : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Emijrp/All_human_knowledge
Apparently a would be roughly around 120 000 000.
As media coverage and scientific research become most efficient every year, I suspect that b is contantly growing, and follow a geometric progression. Yet I don't know how to figure that out in concrete: perhaps something like 100 000 * 1,05^n.
100 000 being a low estimation regarding the current growth of knowledge (new biological species, new people, new political issues, new scientific concepts and discoveries…).
PCL
We have a new article in The Atlantic,
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/surmounting-the-insurm...
(which btw I found following Dario's twitter, @ReaderMeter, which I recommend)
and this is still the same story of whether we achieved the limit of what can be written etc). Without going into details of this animated debate (I have smth to say, for instance, I just created two articles which have about a hundred red links, and the material to fill in these red links is available, but this will lead us away from the topic), I am curious, if anybody ever tried to estimate what is the possible number of notable topics for articles. On the short time scale, it should grow linearly with time, since we have new sports events, elections, TW shows, movies, books etc, and many persons who previously not been notable become notable. Thus, this number must be
N = a + b (t-2012),
where a is the number of topics notable now, t is the time in years, and b is the number of new topics which become notable every year.
Was there any research on what order of magnitude a and b have? I guess b must be in the order of dozens of thousands, since we are talking about people. What is a? Is it dominated by the number of species of insects, or cosmic bodies, or what?
I tried to ask this question several years ago in Russian Wikipedia, but there was no concluding answer.
Cheers Yaroslav
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