On 05/10/05, BJörn Lindqvist <bjourne(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I heard one that the total sum of all human knowledge
has doubled very
second year for the past few decades. As in: The scientists doing
research between 2003 - 2005 learned more things than everything they
knew in the beginning of 2003. So if we want to keep Wikipedia's
coverage as broad and deep as it is today, the number of articles have
to double every other year.
Doubling every other year is a 40% year-on-year increase. According to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm en.wiki
seems to have been increasing article count at circa 6% per month for
much of the year, assuming it hasn't significantly changed recently.
6% per month constant growth is - roughly - 100% year-on-year
increase. By wordcount, it was going up... hmm, let's call it 7.5% and
be conservative. That's roughly a 140% increase year-on-year.
At current rates, then, we're growing much faster than scientific
knowledge is! That said, I have my doubts over the figure - it sounds
far too hard to quantify, and a little too neat to be true. Maybe it's
quantifying raw data generation? That I could well believe. (Did I
ever point this list to the video of Lessig's talk at Fermilab? I must
dig up my notes on it)
Mind you, it's a pretty good metric - doubling over two years is
definitely the kind of thing we'd want a good healthy project to be
doing. If you want to use this metric in future, a handy rule of thumb
is that any wiki which grows at *3% or more* a month, in your
favourite way of counting "size", will a little more than double over
two years. Feel free to use this to encourage people...
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk