2008/8/8 geni <geniice(a)gmail.com>om>:
2008/8/8 Ian Woollard
<ian.woollard(a)gmail.com>om>:
2008/8/8 geni <geniice(a)gmail.com>om>:
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