[Foundation-l] Lack of research on Wikipedia

Fred Bauder fredbaud at fairpoint.net
Sun Aug 16 18:07:20 UTC 2009


> 2009/8/16 John at Darkstar <vacuum at jeb.no>:
>
>> I would guess that the most important reason why english wikipedia is
>> slowing down is because of the other language projects gets the
>> attention of the editors. perhaps it would be possible to get some
>> numbers on the total influx of content and how it is distributed among
>> the projects?
>
>
> Many (particularly, as I recall, Andrew Lih) were saying a few years
> ago that en:wp growth would follow a sigmoid logistic curve rather
> than the pure exponential curve it appeared to be following at the
> time:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_curve

This would be true if it were not for continual creation of novelties
which will justify creation of new articles. Only if obsolete subjects
are deleted at the same rate would the encyclopedia cease to slowly grow.
A graph of the number of articles will not flatten as a standard logistic
sigmoid function does.

Fred




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