On Sun, 28 Oct 2012 11:08:29 +0100, Dariusz Jemielniak wrote:
hi,
hmm...
Was there any research on what order of magnitude a and b have? I guess b must be in the order of dozens of thousands, since we are talking about people. What is a? Is it dominated by the number of species of insects, or cosmic bodies, or what?
but what would be the unit of measurement? Also, per analogiam: new cameras resolution is improving from year to year. When exactly should it stop? Theres no easy answer, because all depends on how much you think you should be able to magnify a picture without pixelization.
Id say that for all practical purposes Wikipedia will be saturated when the vast majority of searches is covered, and users find abundance of information for whatever topic they research, and this information is given to them at the exact level of sophistication theyre ready to comprehend. Were waaay far from this ideal.
best,
dariusz
Hi Dariusz,
I do not understand your question. In my formula, a is measured in articled, and b is measured in articles per year, as detailed.
I believe there are two different issues. The first is what is the maximum possible number of articles (this is what I asked). For all practical purposes (manpower we have, time until Wikipedia will collapce and cease to exist, etc) we will only able to write a tiny part of them. This is why media are discussing questions like whether English Wikipedia will ever reach 5M articles. I think this is a much more complex issue which has to do with the editor retention dynamics and general lifetime of internet companies.
Cheers Yaroslav