2009/1/17 Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com:
Thomas Larsen wrote:
I think we can and will get exponential growth (although perhaps I'm being too optimistic), but it won't be on Wikipedia's scale unless something drastic happens.
Hmm, [[exponential growth]] used to contain the helpful remark that growth may be exponential and also very slow (contra over-excited common usage).
Indeed. However, in this case, my prediction is that they will have linear growth until they reach a certain point at which they become useful to readers and then they get exponential growth at a reasonably impressive rate. The linear growth is caused by early adopters that want to edit Epistemia because it's new and don't care that it isn't very useful yet, the exponential growth will be caused by people that came along to read something and ended up staying and editing. The big question is whether the linear growth will be fast enough to reach that point before running out of steam (the rule of thumb is that people stay in an given online community for around 18 months, so you probably have 18 months to become useful).