[WikiEN-l] Featured churn

[Charles Matthews]

Bod Notbod wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 12:19 PM, Carcharoth
> <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> As long as history doesn't come to an end, and new people keep getting
>> born and (annoyingly) becoming notable enough for a Wikipedia article,
>> there will always be a need for new articles.
>>     
>
> Not to mention people's irritating and continuing habit of publishing
> successful books, making notable films (running the risk of creating
> notable actors and other staff), creating successful companies with
> successful products, progressing with scientific enquiry, advancing
> technology, releasing new software...
>   
Yes. To be tedious and pedantic about it all, once we have finished 
Phase 1 of enWP, where we were playing catch-up with the obviously 
encyclopedic topics like chemical elements and US Presidents (etc.), we 
get to Phase 2, where the new articles fall into several distinct classes:

(1) articles about newly notable topics;
(2) articles about fairly obviously encyclopedic topics, for which 
sources were available without too much trouble and which fit into 
existing coverage, but had been missed for whatever reason;
(3) articles which are much like those in (2) to create, but only came 
to light after someone expanded existing coverage somewhere (new redlinks);
(4) articles for redlinks where the supporting sources took a bit of 
quarrying out.

So we are really saying that (1) is generally speaking the 'reactive' 
class. To some extent the rate of creation is not under "our" control 
(these articles will be started in some form anyway). The others are the 
'proactive' classes: (2) really just requires people to read the site 
and notice places where redlinks are or should be, and create good stubs 
that are not a huge effort (the traditional form of growth). (3) 
requires upgrading stubs to generate fuller coverage, and then we are 
back to (2). While (4) takes us back to the "librarian" discussion: 
deeper-cutting research skills required. (There is really also (5), 
completism for lists, which gets through to me, but perhaps is a 
minority interest.)

So what we get is a rate of growth by the article-number metric (not the 
only interesting measure) where one component is mostly to do with 
outside 'push', while the others are 'pull', and depend on how 
Wikipedians self-assign to tasks.

Charles