[WikiEN-l] The Statistical Decline of the English Wikipedia Community

[Ian Woollard]

On 13/10/2007, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
>
> Well, I suppose an encyclopedia is limited in some way by the number
> of atoms in the universe, but for practical purposes the only real
> limit is whatever the writers impose on it.
>
> I think there are well over a billion topics to write about.  The
> theoretical limit hasn't been approached yet.
>

Right. But perhaps that's not the question. The question is are there a
billion topics that are encyclopaedic? Presumably for something to be
encyclopaedic it would have to be potentially interesting to a large number
of people, not just people that happened to have physical contact with a
particular street or school for example. A lot of a 'billion topics' would
be only interesting to very few, so most of the article wouldn't be notable,
and the article would (or should) be very short- and there would be less
contributors to it.

Don't encyclopaedias emphasise generality by their very nature and isn't
generality a summary? And isn't a summary inherently relatively short?

You know what? Ultimately, I have my suspicions, but I don't know. But if
the graph does continue to come down, then I think we will begin to know.

-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
imperfect world things would be a lot better.