On 10/13/07, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
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.
Oh yeah, I meant to add this but I got sidetracked. I think another part of it is that a lot of the most popular articles are reaching or have reached the limit of what a wiki process can produce. In that sense the low-hanging fruit has become the hardest to reach. It's my opinion, and it's a controversial one, that a wiki can't produce a perfect article and at some point the amount of regression is going to equal the amount of progress. If there were some way to get people to stop wasting their time on articles at that stage and focus instead on the Mzoli's Meats of the world I think there'd be plenty of growth ahead.
Other people say the exact opposite though, that we should focus on improving [[Islam]] and forget about [[Mzoli's Meats]]. And that's probably what's going to happen for the near future.