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

[Tilman Bayer]

On Sun, Sep 11, 2011 at 3:04 AM, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1378720 Spinellis/Louridas, "The
collaborative organization of knowledge", complemented in
http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20080808/ and summarized in
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2008-08-11/Growth_study

-- 
Tilman Bayer
Movement Communications
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB