Even if the online resources didn't improve, and we could really do with a big improvement in parts of the developing world, as long as the Internet continues to be updated we can expect a steady flow of new articles. Sports, Politics, popular culture and science are all going to generate new articles for the foreseeable future. We currently have half a million biographies of living people, assuming we keep our current notability standards and coverage levels, then to keep that number stable we can expect at least ten thousand more each year. So even without filling in the historical gaps there will be a steady increase in the total number of biographies on the pedia. Large gaps in our coverage of people who retired pre-Internet are slowly being filled in from the obituary pages, and that could continue for decades. Every year there will be new films, books, natural disasters and sports events. So if we still have an editor community to write them, we can expect a steady flow of new articles.
I think we need a model of article growth that blends two elements, multiple bell curves showing the process of initially populating the pedia with various subjects, and an annual input of new articles on newly notable subjects. I expect that on many subjects of interest to our first wave of editors - computing, milhist, contemporary western popular culture and the geography of the English speaking parts of the developed world we have already gone quite away over the top of the bell. But there are other bell curves that we are at much earlier stages of. Judging from the newpages I've seen in the last few months populated places in the Indian subcontinent is very much on the fast rising side of the bell curve. The bell curves of species, astronomical objects, chemicals, genes and chemicals are all in their early stages. In future as new editors come on board or existing editors acquire new enthusiasms we can expect that yet unwritten areas of the pedia will go through their own bell curve expansions.
We still have a huge influx of new editors, though very few stick around. I suspect the ultimate size of the pedia depends at least as much on the way we treat new editors as it does on the availability of easily accessible sources.
WereSpielChequers
On 17 February 2011 09:38, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
On 16/02/2011 23:56, Carcharoth wrote:
On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 9:54 PM, David Gerarddgerard@gmail.com wrote:
There's a *heck* of a lot still to be written.
On that topic, I came across this interesting essay:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Modelling_Wikipedia_extended_growth
It tries to project to the year 2025!
I'd be interested in any discussion at all on the amount of useful material out there (on the Web) and how it is changing. It is a fact that there are more and more reliable sources posted that can be used to create articles. This is a factor that affects directly what actually gets written, as opposed to what potentially might be a topic to write about.
I think we just don't know how much will be around in 2025 that could support our work, either in the form of public domain reference material, or respectable scholarly webpages to which we can link. Extrapolations leaving out this factor aren't worth as much as they might be.
Charles
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