On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 10:07 AM, Ian Woollardian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
It's looking to me like 3.5 million is about the plateau, since the curve is bang on that, but we might make 4 million *eventually*.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Modelling_Wikipedia%27s_growth#Logist...
I don't think the bell-shaped articles/day curve of the logistic model is a good description of the trends. Since article creation peaked in 2007, the falloff in article creation has been much slower than than ramp-up. Rather than falling back to close to zero articles/day over the next 5 years or so (as the logistic model predicts), it looks like we're heading to an asymptote of (I'm eyeballing it here) around 1000 articles/day. I expect 4 million articles a lot sooner than *eventually*. ;)
The significant non-zero asymptote makes sense to me in terms of what kinds of articles remain to be written: *High-profile topics that aren't notable yet. The news generates a steady stream of newly notable topics that a wide variety of people want to write about. *The vast pool of notable topics (tens of millions, according to some back-of-the-envelope estimates that have made the rounds here before) for which article creation rate is limited by the number of interested/knowledgeable writers.
Between those classes, I'd be surprised if yearly growth fell below 300,000 any time soon.
-Sage