Thomas Dalton wrote:
> 2009/2/16 Sage Ross
<ragesoss+wikipedia(a)gmail.com>om>:
>> On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 3:40 PM, Thomas Dalton
>> <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I'm just going by the statistics, I'm not making any judgements
>>> based on anything else. At the moment, we seem to be following a
>>> logistic curve which levels out at around 3.5 million articles in
>>> around 2013-14. (It's asymptotic, but it will be pretty much there
>>> by then.)
>>>
>>
>> So far, "low-hanging fruit" has dominated the growth pattern of
>> Wikipedia. Rather than approaching a horizontal asymptote, we're
>> probably approaching a stable growth rate (i.e., an oblique
>> asymptote), since it's obvious that the number of potential articles
>> yet to be written is not the limiting factor. Rather we're limited
>> by
>> a product of potential articles and users interested in those
>> articles.
>>
>> But statistically it's probably impossible to know that just from
>> the
>> data, since low-hanging fruit swamps longer-term trends.
>
> 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.
I think that this was bound to happen; any venture based on describing the
known universe has an inherent limit in any case, and it seems obvious that
once you've reached some level of coverage, what happens then is more
determined by the pace of real life events. However, like software, it's
arguable that an encyclopedia is never really finished. Good Articles may be
good, and Featured Articles better, but something will always come along to
require additions. As for relaxing notability guidelines, I think we very
largely get it about right at present, and opening a can of worms does not
commend itself to me as a policy.