On Thu, 7 Feb 2002, David Merrill wrote:
One interesting phenomenon, though, is that as the content broadens, people might tend to work more on existing articles and new article creation slow correspondingly. Not that that's a bad thing. It's better to have 50,000 excellent articles than 500,000 rambling, incoherent, or incorrect ones.
I agree with this, by the way. I have a little theory that, as the easy and broad topics get pretty much filled in, the project is going to start looking more interesting to specialists, and I'll see a gradual influx of Ph.D.'s and researchers filling in the blanks on the frontiers of their fields.
This is mainly wishful thinking, of course; there's no *real* way of knowing what's gonna happen. It's possible that we will always suffer from the stigma (if you want to call it that :-) ) of being completely open to anyone to contribute, and as a result, there will be a level of speciality, accessible mainly to specialists who care about exclusivity, beyond which we just won't be able to go. Of course, there will be exceptions, as in the case of the engineer who wrote some articles about some extremely specialized electrical engineering topics...
Idle musings...
Brace yourself for a huge announcement tomorrow. :-)
Larry