[WikiEN-l] Looking for thoughts on statistics

[Carcharoth]

On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 5:02 PM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:

<snip>

> I think a lot of people get involved to write new articles. It looks
> like 2007 was 'peak oil' for new articles; after that it was getting
> harder to find new articles to write; about half of the articles that
> were realistically likely to be covered, were already covered.

Does it make sense to say this when *thousands* of articles are being
created every day? Where does the idea even come from that "about half
of the articles that were realistically likely to be covered, were
already covered"? The question that needs to be asked is whether the
"New articles per day" statistic is a measure of the articles being
created, or the articles that are still there as having been created
on that day, a set period (e.g. a year) after being created? i.e. Is
the rate of article deletion included or excluded from those figures?

My view is that the rate of article creation and the number of
"missing" articles depends *heavily* on the topic area. Some topic
areas are very well covered, others are not so well covered. In the
former areas, you will indeed struggle to find new articles to create,
but there are some areas (history in particular) where there are
thousands (probably tens of thousands) of articles still needed. I
could easily make lists hundreds of items long of things that an
article could be written on (this is limited mainly by the time I have
to compile such lists), mostly on historical subjects, but also a fair
amount of contemporary stuff as well. Seriously. Pick any topic and I
can guarantee that a list of ten new articles for that topic area
would be easy to compile.

Just as an example, I was taking part in the Military History World
War I contest recently, and there were at least 43 new articles
created (or expanded) for DYK. I'm currently trying to work out how
many articles were actually created (as opposed to expanded).

A better approach would be to look at samples of article creation and
see what articles are being created and that will give you an idea of
where the gaps are being filled in and hence how big the gaps are.

Carcharoth