[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia - An infinite number of lists

[Michael Santora]

The number of articles which Wikipedia can have is
limited by the number of at least marginally notable
and verifiable things which exist.  After every
notable person, place, movie, scientific topic, and so
on have their own article, we'll run out of things to
write about.  Whether this will happen at 2 million, 3
million, 4 million, it will happen.

On the other hand, the potential number of lists is
almost infinite, as there are a virtually unlimited
number of ways of slicing up portions of reality.

For example, one could make a "List of birds native to
the Chicago area".  If it were nicely wikified and
contained a reasonable number of items on it, it would
certainly not be deleted.

However, what you've actually done is create the first
example of "List of X's native to the Y area", where X
is any one of dozens or hundreds of types of
creatures... insects, mammals, amphibians, trees,
flowers, and so on, while Y is any one of tens of
thousands of towns, cities, states, counties,
countries, provinces, geographic areas, and so on.

Multiply 100 X's by 50,000 Y's, and you get 5 million
lists.

Take the roughly 500,000 of our article topics which
have been mentioned enough times in popular culture to
make up a list, and you get 500,000 "X in popular
culture" articles.

Take every one of the tens of thousands of diseases
which exist, find evidence of notable people who have
had the disease, and you get 25,000 "List of people
who have had disease X" articles.

And so on, and so on, and so on.

Even removing the obvious silly and ridiculous lists,
like "List of blind left-handed Canadians who have
worn blue jeans" still leaves us with more reasonable
sounding lists than any of ever imagined we would
have.

End result: en.Wikipedia, in the year 2050, will have
5 million articles, and 500 million lists.


 
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