I wonder about how much of the fruit we've gathered. The plant WikiProject has about 30,000 articles, which include a mixture of articles about plant species, plant morphology and anatomy, and plant biologists. There are close to 300,000 plant species in the world. If we're only in the 5-10% range when it comes to coverage, I could imagine that could easily triple the number of articles without delving into the really hard to find corners. I can imagine that the Arthropods WikiProject (and its daughter projects) have about 13,000 articles under their care. Again, adding 100,000 arthropod articles shouldn't be difficult. True, the stuff that you could add off the top of your head may be gone, but grab a good field guide to plants, or grab a historical dictionary, and you could add hundreds of articles. To me it always seems like time is the major constraint, not stuff that needs to be written about...
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 3:17 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
I think we passed to point where low-hanging fruit was a major factor some time ago (probably round about when we started to level out, although it obviously depends on your definitions). I think in a few years the vast majority of existing topics that we want to include will have at least stubs about them. There will be new topics being created all the time, so growth will never stop completely (there will always be a new series of Big Brother to write about!). We might expand our ideas of what kind of articles are acceptable (ie. relax our notability guidelines), but that's the only way we are going to maintain any significant level of article creation about pre-existing topics.