On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 11:42 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
We're shrinking because we've already written most of the stuff we want to include.
This is orthogonal to the main conversation here, but this is not nearly the case.
We've picked off a lot of low hanging fruit, approaching all of it. Things which haven't been dealt with include figuring out where a more liberal livable line lies in the inclusionism question, and filling in a lot of semi specialist topics which are currently woefully underrepresented. There are whole fields of engineering and science that we have barely scratched the surface of at the moment.
A month-ish ago, I spent a week putting together an article on one explosives engineering topic which was completely missing... leaving us with about 95% of that field still uncovered so far.
Aerospace engineering is poorly covered.
Automobile engineering is somewhat covered, but not with really good articles. Rocketry needs a lot more. Astrodynamics needs a lot more.
Naval architecture and ship design topics are poorly covered now.
Three of the last eight highly technical terms I went looking for information on weren't in Wikipedia in any significant way, across a bunch of fields.
This is just what's on my mind right now. Every time I've looked at it I've found more gaps.
I could spend the rest of my life adding information to Wikipedia, at this rate, if I didn't have to have a day job and didn't want to go sit on a beach. Hopefully we can over time add more new editors / contributors in these fields so I don't have to 8-P