On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 5:59 AM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
On 14/07/2009, Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 10:07 AM, Ian Woollardian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
It's looking to me like 3.5 million is about the plateau, since the curve is bang on that, but we might make 4 million *eventually*.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Modelling_Wikipedia%27s_growth#Logist...
I don't think the bell-shaped articles/day curve of the logistic model is a good description of the trends. Since article creation peaked in 2007, the falloff in article creation has been much slower than than ramp-up. Rather than falling back to close to zero articles/day over the next 5 years or so (as the logistic model predicts), it looks like we're heading to an asymptote of (I'm eyeballing it here) around 1000 articles/day. I expect 4 million articles a lot sooner than *eventually*. ;)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enwikipediagrowth.PNG
We're already down to 1000/day growth on the unsmoothed graph as we fall off one of the two biannual growth peaks.
Looks like the Wikipedia is still bang-on for 3.5 million articles.
As long as history doesn't come to an end, and new people keep getting born and (annoyingly) becoming notable enough for a Wikipedia article, there will always be a need for new articles.
Carcharoth