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

[Andrew Gray]

On 13/10/2007, Matthew Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/12/07, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> > I think there are well over a billion topics to write about.  The
> > theoretical limit hasn't been approached yet.
>
> However, I suspect the low-hanging fruit is getting closer to being
> exhausted.  The topics that your average 15-25 year old computer nerd
> in an English speaking country is likely to know about.

A distinction I've suggested is that there are a near-infinity of
possible topics, but only a finite few million that are topics more
than one person actually wants to write ;-)

The low-hanging fruit is exactly it - we'll surge ahead, fill up the
"comprehensible stuff" (Western, Anglospheric, contemporary,
non-technical), then slow to a trickle of a few hundred a day on
Moorish musicologists of the ninth century, minor asteroids, Yet
Another Species Of Beetle, rural villages in Shenzen, etc. This won't
be due to any lack of topics so much as due to a lack of people
wanting to write about those topics.

So we need to figure out ways to channel our effort into expanding and
developing what we have - the big field for new articles, which we may
start mining soon or may start in four years time, will be breaking
existing articles up into sections and spinning them off as daughter
articles.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk