[WikiEN-l] Who was saying quantity vs quality?

[Ian Woollard]

2008/8/8 geni <geniice at gmail.com>:
> 2008/8/8 Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com>:
>> 2008/8/8 geni <geniice at gmail.com>:
>> Yeah, cos the population of editors to write the English wikipedia is
>> growing at the web growth rate due to the lack of censorship giving
>> them impure thoughts.
>
> Anything less than web growth rate shows we are being less successful
> than recruiting in the past.

I'm sorry, I simply don't agree with this idea.

There simply isn't an infinite amount of human knowledge, there is, by
definition a finite amount. And there's a rather smaller amount of
encyclopedic knowledge than that.

I consider an update to the wikipedia to be fixing a bug- we're adding
something that isn't there already, that should be there. In software
(which the wikipedia is really) fixing bugs is an exponential decay
process.

The problem is, as the wikipedia is written, we get the low-hanging
fruit early on, and then the remaining fruit is higher and higher up
the tree of knowledge, and is harder to understand, less people have
the knowledge, and the chances of somebody fixing its omission goes
down.

We rode the curve of web growth well up to about late 2007, after that
the curve of knowledge difficulty has had a more significant effect
and can be expected to decrease the growth rate even further over
time.

I see no evidence in the data for the idea that the wikipedia is
causing the reduction in growth, and I see strong evidence that it is
simply getting harder and harder to add new knowledge, because you
have to spot a rare gap that hasn't already been filled.

Basically, the argument in:

http://en.wikipedia.org
wiki/Wikipedia:Modelling_Wikipedia%27s_growth#Is_the_growth_in_article_count_of_Wikipedia_logistic.3F

is that the data is consistent with the growth of the wikipedia
following a logistics curve, and I firmly believe that this is what is
happening- there's two exponentials at work here.

You could, by all means add a whole bunch of largely useless
information into the wikipedia, but that won't make the wikipedia
materially more useful to people- so the *effective* size- the
wikipedia that people actually look at, will continue to follow the
curve that it's already on.

> --
> geni

-- 
-Ian Woollard

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