We have a new article in The Atlantic,
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/surmounting-the-insur…
(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