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.
We rode the curve of web growth well up to about late 2007, after that the curve of knowledge difficulty has had a more significant effect and can be expected to decrease the growth rate even further over time.
I see no evidence in the data for the idea that the wikipedia is causing the reduction in growth, and I see strong evidence that it is simply getting harder and harder to add new knowledge, because you have to spot a rare gap that hasn't already been filled.
Basically, the argument in:
http://en.wikipedia.org wiki/Wikipedia:Modelling_Wikipedia%27s_growth#Is_the_growth_in_article_count_of_Wikipedia_logistic.3F
is that the data is consistent with the growth of the wikipedia following a logistics curve, and I firmly believe that this is what is happening- there's two exponentials at work here.
You could, by all means add a whole bunch of largely useless information into the wikipedia, but that won't make the wikipedia materially more useful to people- so the *effective* size- the wikipedia that people actually look at, will continue to follow the curve that it's already on.
-- geni