2008/8/8 geni geniice@gmail.com:
2008/8/8 Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com:
2008/8/8 geni geniice@gmail.com: Yeah, cos the population of editors to write the English wikipedia is growing at the web growth rate due to the lack of censorship giving them impure thoughts.
Anything less than web growth rate shows we are being less successful than recruiting in the past.
I'm sorry, I simply don't agree with this idea.
There simply isn't an infinite amount of human knowledge, there is, by definition a finite amount. And there's a rather smaller amount of encyclopedic knowledge than that.
I consider an update to the wikipedia to be fixing a bug- we're adding something that isn't there already, that should be there. In software (which the wikipedia is really) fixing bugs is an exponential decay process.
The problem is, as the wikipedia is written, we get the low-hanging fruit early on, and then the remaining fruit is higher and higher up the tree of knowledge, and is harder to understand, less people have the knowledge, and the chances of somebody fixing its omission goes down.
I would go further than that, humans are quite limited in their interests and attention spans. Excellent coverage of highly significant issues is desirable, but very few people can keep track of more than a few hundred such issues.
Fred