On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 10:30 AM, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net>wrote;wrote: So your suggestion to improve quality is quantity (of time spent). While we're making useless suggestions, my suggestion is to spend the same amount of time on improving the quality of the Articles that exist now, but to do so more efficiently. Or even better, my suggestion is to invent an article-writing robot to automatically write a perfect article if we only feed it an article title.

2008/8/8 Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net>et>: Not really. While a case could be made for an article plateau (at around 100 million articles estimates vary) not for an edit rate plateau and even there we would expect growth at a level roughly equal to web growth rates. -- geni

2008/8/8 Ian Woollard <ian.woollard(a)gmail.com>om>: Anything less than web growth rate shows we are being less successful than recruiting in the past. Actually writing them wouldn't for the most part be a problem (mostly once you deal with some of the copyright issues). Ensuring they are about things other than chemicals and astronomical objects may be more of a challenge. -- geni

Recruitment, in my totallyunscientific opinion. A year ago, a jazz band that won several international awards, that had an acclaimed album out (produced by a noted famous producer, no less) would have had an article on Wikipedia. Someone's first thought when coming across the band would have been "I'll see what I can find on Wikipedia", and then "Oh, hang on, no article, I'll go and do a stub". [[Empirical (jazz band)]] is such a band. And it was recently prominently featured on BoingBoing. That alone would have been enough, in the past, to get a Wikipedia article. As it was, I created their article myself. I know next to nothing about them except that I have their debut album and that I quite like it. Just a year ago you could have gotten away with creating a one-paragraph stub. Any bets how long it would have taken for the article to be speedied if I hadn't provided two sources? Any guesses as to why the article was not created sooner? Michel Vuijlsteke 2008/8/9 James Farrar <james.farrar(a)gmail.com>

2008/8/8 geni <geniice(a)gmail.com>om>: I'm sorry, I simply don't agree with this idea. There simply isn't an infinite amount of human knowledge, there is, by definition a finite amount. And there's a rather smaller amount of encyclopedic knowledge than that. I consider an update to the wikipedia to be fixing a bug- we're adding something that isn't there already, that should be there. In software (which the wikipedia is really) fixing bugs is an exponential decay process. The problem is, as the wikipedia is written, we get the low-hanging fruit early on, and then the remaining fruit is higher and higher up the tree of knowledge, and is harder to understand, less people have the knowledge, and the chances of somebody fixing its omission goes down. We rode the curve of web growth well up to about late 2007, after that the curve of knowledge difficulty has had a more significant effect and can be expected to decrease the growth rate even further over time. I see no evidence in the data for the idea that the wikipedia is causing the reduction in growth, and I see strong evidence that it is simply getting harder and harder to add new knowledge, because you have to spot a rare gap that hasn't already been filled. Basically, the argument in: http://en.wikipedia.org wiki/Wikipedia:Modelling_Wikipedia%27s_growth#Is_the_growth_in_article_count_of_Wikipedia_logistic.3F is that the data is consistent with the growth of the wikipedia following a logistics curve, and I firmly believe that this is what is happening- there's two exponentials at work here. You could, by all means add a whole bunch of largely useless information into the wikipedia, but that won't make the wikipedia materially more useful to people- so the *effective* size- the wikipedia that people actually look at, will continue to follow the curve that it's already on. -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.