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

[Anthony]

On 10/12/07, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

Depends what you mean by encyclopaedic.  In my mind the term
"encyclopedic" mainly refers to the form of an article.  A topic is
"encyclopedic" basically if it's in the form of an encyclopedia
article title.  So pretty much any noun is an encyclopedic topic.
Might not be notable, mind you, but it's encyclopedic.

> 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.

I'd call that notable, not encyclopedic, personally, but I'd venture a
guess my idea of "a large number" is much smaller than yours.  100
people interested in a topic is probably enough by my mind.  Certainly
every publicly traded company in the world (or private one owned by at
least 100 people, or with at least 100 customers), every book (or
song, or periodical, or painting, or car model) which sold 100 copies
(plus at least the main author of each such work), every school, every
professional sports player, every candidate for public office
including write-in candidates who received the necessary signatures to
be a valid write-in candidate, every geographical location with at
least 100 residents, every species, every software program with at
least 100 downloads, every bridge crossed by 100 cars a week, etc.

That's only what's interesting enough, mind you.  In the case of some
of those topics, especially living people, we might not want to write
about them (for privacy reasons, or simply because it'd attract too
much vandalism, the latter of which might be fixable if a decent
stable versions feature is implemented).  Even throw out all living
people though and I think we could still come up with a billion
topics.

It'd be interesting to form a list.  One argument from so called
deletionists which I find most difficult to argue with is that we
shouldn't have an article on a "less notable" topic until first having
near-complete coverage of the "more notable" topics.  But even if we
went with that, there'd still be nearly no limit to the number of
things we could write about, it'd just have to happen in a particular
order.

Matthew Brown wrote:
> 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.

If these statistics are actually the beginning of a new trend (I don't
think that's a given), then I think that's probably a decent
explanation, though somewhat oversimplified.  I think the really
low-hanging fruit that you describe was mostly exhausted long ago, and
what's reaching the tipping point (think logarithmic decay) is the
stuff that you don't know off the top of your head but you can easily
research on the web.

But there are also limitations we're imposing on ourselves, especially
with regard to companies and products.  I've anonymously written
several articles on companies and products and seen them deleted.
Some others were tagged for deletion and probably would have been
deleted had I not disputed the deletion tag.  Think of the hullabaloo
caused over http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mzoli%27s_Meats&oldid=158511192.
 I don't know if the spam tag that was added was a bit of trolling or
POINTing or what, but had that article been written by an anonymous
user I don't think it would have survived.