On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 12:08, GoEthe.wiki goethe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
And even if that was true for the English Wikipedia, it certainly is not for other large Wikipedias, which seem to have the same trend, according to the study.
2011/3/29 Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.rs
On 03/29/2011 11:40 AM, Theo10011 wrote:
The second issue as I see it, we might not be approaching the sum of all human knowledge but we're running out of what the core
non/semi-professional
community can contribute. We are at over 3.5 million articles (go
Pokemon)
I strongly disagree. I see thousands of articles I could write outside of my profession if only I would have time and inclination. And I see missing articles even in well-covered topics like programming.
No, we are not approaching "sum of the human knowledge".
But, we are approaching some limits.
Let me explain it through one simple example.
Let's say that there is Wikipedia in X language with just one editor. That editor is expert in, let's say, medieval history and has passion toward chess. That person would spend years in: (1) writing basic articles -- although he is not astronomer, he knows that it is important to have articles like "Sun", "Earth", "Jupiter" etc.; (2) writing articles in medieval history; (3) writing articles about chess; (4) and, finally, writing articles about surrounding areas of medieval history and chess (let's say, ancient history and go).
If that person didn't stop because of lack of time or lack of satisfaction, it is reasonably to expect that he will at some point come to the situation where all articles are written according to his level of knowledge. (That's the ideal situation, but it also assumes the ideal systematization of the work on articles, which is not likely, too.)
We are witnessing similar trend on much larger scale. For example, if I want to write now something about one of the Anatolian languages, I have to spend today much more time than I had to while those articles didn't exist. Instead of using one or two legitimate sources, I have to check every fact and every source inside of the existing articles. And that's not beyond limits of my knowledge, but beyond limits of my willingness to spend in that way my free time. (Besides the fact that there are 2/3 chances to find a bureaucratic moron and spend the rest of the day in asking myself why I started to edit Wikipedia *again*.) Yes, I will spend more time in writing articles from the area of my expertise, but Anatolian languages don't belong there. And thanks to the fact that there are no Wikipedians who are experts in Anatolian languages and know English, we will have informative, but far from satisfactory articles (three most important articles haven't been significantly changed for two or three years: Anatolian languages [1], Hittite language [2] and Luwian language [3]).
So, yes, we are around some of the limits. It is, of course, far from any sum of knowledge, but close to our capacities. And those capacities are comparable among various Wikipedia editions as English is the language with the most of primary and secondary speakers and all of other languages have less (primary + secondary) speakers than it.
The situation "many people don't have a lot to write" also creates decline. Yes, there are many people who are able to write a lot, but even if 30% of "people" decrease their activity for 50%, it is 15% of decline. (Numbers are not so simple, of course, but we see inside of them decline in almost every aspect.) Visible effects are similar and connected to the situation "we wrote everything". BTW, if we wrote everything, we wouldn't have any activity. If there is no Hungarian who knows something which doesn't exist on Hungarian Wikipedia -- there wouldn't be activity on Hungarian Wikipedia. And so on.
And a note about translation: No, I wouldn't translate article about Hittite language from English Wikipedia. The article is not so good. And there are a *lot* of such articles in English Wikipedia: those which are not worthy of translation. So, the argument "But, they could translate articles from English Wikipedia!" isn't always true. Besides the fact that I've started to see more and more garbage-articles at English Wikipedia, as there are not enough editors to keep systemic consistency.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolian_languages [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_language [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luwian_language