On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 3:40 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@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.
-Sage (User:Ragesoss)