[WikiEN-l] Looking for thoughts on statistics

[Charles Matthews]

Ian Woollard wrote:
> * - there's been some new articles required since the Wikipedia
> started up in 2001; knowledge has been created! New knowledge is
> eventually going to set the level of continued growth of the
> Wikipedia, perhaps about 500 articles per day or something. If you
> look at the new article feed we're growing at about ~1200 articles per
> day, and perhaps about half of those likely to survive in the feed are
> now about topics that happened since the Wikipedia started and
> couldn't have been written in 2001. Basically, the Wikipedia has been
> playing catch-up on 2001 till now as well as dealing with new
> knowledge; but IMO it will probably be mostly dealing with new
> knowledge within the next year or so.
>   
I don't completely agree here, but I do think an analysis by various 
"phases" is probably helpful - more so than trying to attribute changes 
in the editing pattern to specific "management decisions", though these 
do have an impact that is not negligible.

For the future historian of enWP, I suspect, the "end of the beginning" 
will be a key point. This is what I'd refer to as "we get the first 
draft"; the point (maybe in 2008?) where it would make sense to say "so 
in future the coverage is going to be something like this, except more 
so in some places". This is an approximate sort of concept, as is the 
demographic idea of "saturation", where "everybody likely to want to 
hear of Wikipedia has by now heard of it". Somewhere, in those concepts 
and the content/community matchup, is a basic truth about what we have 
been doing in the first nine years: collating information and recruiting 
editors, to the point where the nature of the project (as opposed to the 
nature of the mission, abstractly stated) has become reasonably clear.

So in those terms, at least, the peak of sheer activity anticipates the 
"first draft" by a year or so. Plausible enough to me: before you get 
your first draft together there are "placeholder" parts where the author 
knows that what currrently stands there is sorely deficient, things just 
dashed down. Sounds familiar enough for the sort of content that has 
needed to be gradually eradicated. Doing that is something more like 
real work (the point made earlier in the thread about referencing).

Charles