[Foundation-l] [Wiki-research-l] Summary of findings from WMF Summer of Research program now available

Liam Wyatt liamwyatt at gmail.com
Sun Sep 11 01:04:35 UTC 2011


On 10/09/2011, at 23:04, emijrp <emijrp at gmail.com> wrote:

> The interesting thing here is, 4.8M unique red links in 2009, and unique
> 5.6M red links in 2011. *The more articles are created, the more articles
> are missing*.
> 
Along those lines, I recall seeing (at least three years ago) some research that said the proportion of redlinks was remaining stable even as the number of articles grew. They hypothesised that if the proportion decreased then that would imply that we would eventually stop and "finish" the encyclopedia. And on the other hand if the proportion of redlinks increased that it would imply that the project would eventually decay through too much entropy. Instead of the two extremes the research said that, a bit like goldilocks, the growth was "just right" and could continue indefinitely. Does anyone else remember this research or it's name/author?

-Liam

Wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata


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