[WikiEN-l] Rating the English wikipedia

[WereSpielChequers]

There are two approaches to predicting the size of Wikipedia, one
based on working out how many articles would meet the general
notability guideline, the other charting how we have grown and
extrapolating the curve.

I'm not totally convinced at the 20 million theory based on articles
in different Wikipedias that aren't interwiki linked. I suspect that a
bit more work at finding intrawiki links would chip away at that, I
know from the death anomalies project
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Death_anomalies_table that we are still
adding intrawiki links, and I'm pretty sure that we've added a lot in
the 18 months since the 20 million prediction was made. So the
potential size of the pedia might be less than twenty million, but I'm
pretty sure it is many millions more than the 3.55 million we
currently have. Provided we keep our notability policy and if we can
rein in the deletionists, there are a lot of notable topics that don't
have articles yet.

There was an extrapolation of the trend done in 2007 that predicted
we'd peak at 3.5 million
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Modelling_Wikipedia%27s_growth#Logistic_model_for_growth_in_article_count_of_Wikipedia

We are currently 1% above that and still growing.

The 4.4million prediction comes from the Gompertz model
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia

But the vulnerability of that model, as with any extrapolation, is
that the thing you are modelling can change. If something like WYSIWYG
editing were to bring in a new wave of editors then the model would
break and it would be possible to think in terms of how many potential
articles qualify.


WereSpielChequers



On 14 February 2011 21:54, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 14 February 2011 20:48, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 3:17 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> I recall someone (Ray Saintonge?) working out there'd be at least 20
>>> million, just going on placenames and politicians that are currently
>>> in all the large WPs. Anyone got a link on hand to that?
>
>> Perhaps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus/Wikipedia_interwiki_and_specialized_knowledge_test
>
>
> That's the one!
>
> There's a *heck* of a lot still to be written.
>
>
> - d.
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>