<charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> writes:
Michael Santora wrote
The number of articles which Wikipedia can have
is
limited by the number of at least marginally notable
and verifiable things which exist.
Or have existed. Let's not be presentist.
On the other hand, the potential number of lists
is
almost infinite, as there are a virtually unlimited
number of ways of slicing up portions of reality.
Well, only two to the power of the number of things (unordered
subsets).
End result: en.Wikipedia, in the year 2050, will
have
5 million articles, and 500 million lists.
On a rough calculation at the first London meet-up, I thought 7
million articles
was a reasonable estimate of the number, if we
simply covered the rest of the world in the detail given currently
to US placenames. We could get there by 2015, rather than 2050.
But these estimates have always missed quite how deep the
pockets of the academic
literature have become. One million
compounds in organic chemistry: pretty much a drop in the
ocean. In the humanities, there are thousands upon thousands of
secondary figures, about whom decent papers have been written and
published in respectable journals. How many myths are there? And
how many mythical characters?
Charles
Heck, just biographies alone could get us to dozens or hundreds of
millions of articles:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus/Wikipedia_interwiki_and_specialized_knowledge_test>
--
Gwern
Inquiring minds want to know.