On 10/12/07, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
On 13/10/2007, Anthony wikimail@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=15851119.... 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.