On 05/10/05, BJörn Lindqvist bjourne@gmail.com wrote:
I heard one that the total sum of all human knowledge has doubled very second year for the past few decades. As in: The scientists doing research between 2003 - 2005 learned more things than everything they knew in the beginning of 2003. So if we want to keep Wikipedia's coverage as broad and deep as it is today, the number of articles have to double every other year.
Doubling every other year is a 40% year-on-year increase. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm en.wiki seems to have been increasing article count at circa 6% per month for much of the year, assuming it hasn't significantly changed recently. 6% per month constant growth is - roughly - 100% year-on-year increase. By wordcount, it was going up... hmm, let's call it 7.5% and be conservative. That's roughly a 140% increase year-on-year.
At current rates, then, we're growing much faster than scientific knowledge is! That said, I have my doubts over the figure - it sounds far too hard to quantify, and a little too neat to be true. Maybe it's quantifying raw data generation? That I could well believe. (Did I ever point this list to the video of Lessig's talk at Fermilab? I must dig up my notes on it)
Mind you, it's a pretty good metric - doubling over two years is definitely the kind of thing we'd want a good healthy project to be doing. If you want to use this metric in future, a handy rule of thumb is that any wiki which grows at *3% or more* a month, in your favourite way of counting "size", will a little more than double over two years. Feel free to use this to encourage people...
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk