Hi there, I've just joined the list. I've been contributing to the wiki for a while, but I've got some technical interest now. To start off with, here is a list of "conjectures" that I think are interesting about wikipedia. I'm crossposting from my blog ( http:// simonwoodside.com/weblog/2005/11/20 ). Conjecture 1. That the distance between any two wikipedia pages, randomly chosen, as measured by wikilinks, is on average 6. Conjecture 2. That wikipedia is sufficiently formal and complete that you could build a useful general purpose AI knowledge base using it. Conjecture 3. That wikipedia has low information entropy. Conjecture 4. That the development of a wikipedia article over time occurs in a manner consistent to the biological evolution of a species. Conjecture 5. That the relationship between the amount of material in wikipedia and the number of article views is exponential. Conjecture 6. That wikipedia is, on average, factually accurate. The one that I'm most interested in today, actually is #5 (known as Reed's law) ... because today I went to do some editing and found that the system was very slow... I'm actually a little worried that wikipedia is going to be overwhelmed by it's own popularity. I saw something like this happen before, when I joined a MUD called MicroMUSE back in er... 1993??? Wired issue #3 wrote about it and then they were inundated with users... everything was really slow... well back then I didn't have the technical chops to do something about but now I do. I have some ideas about architectural design of WP's servers in mind that I discussed with some people on #wikimedia- tech today... I'll probably write them up in a few days. Anyway, the motivational reason is that IF conjecture #5 is TRUE, then there's probably some severe architectural implications for WP's technical design. --simon (founder of semacode, contributor to mozilla, etc.) -- http://simonwoodside.com