[WikiEN-l] Scale of online resources, was Re: Rating the English wikipedia

[WereSpielChequers]

Even if the online resources didn't improve, and we could really do
with a big improvement in parts of the developing world, as long as
the Internet continues to be updated we can expect a steady flow of
new articles. Sports, Politics, popular culture and science are all
going to generate new articles for the foreseeable future.  We
currently have half a million biographies of living people, assuming
we keep our current notability standards and coverage levels, then to
keep that number stable  we can expect at least ten thousand more each
year. So even without filling in the historical gaps there will be a
steady increase in the total number of biographies on the pedia.
Large gaps in our coverage of people who retired pre-Internet are
slowly being filled in from the obituary pages, and that could
continue for decades. Every year there will be new films, books,
natural disasters and sports events.  So if we still have an editor
community to write them, we can expect a steady flow of new articles.

I think we need a model of article growth that blends two elements,
multiple bell curves showing the process of  initially populating the
pedia with various subjects, and an annual input of new articles on
newly notable subjects. I expect that on many subjects of interest to
our first wave of editors - computing, milhist, contemporary western
popular culture and the geography of the English speaking parts of the
developed world we have already gone quite away over the top of the
bell. But there are other bell curves that we are at much earlier
stages of. Judging from the newpages I've seen in the last few months
populated places in the Indian subcontinent is very much on the fast
rising side of the bell curve. The bell curves of species,
astronomical objects, chemicals, genes and chemicals are all in their
early stages. In future as new editors come on board or existing
editors acquire new enthusiasms we can expect that yet unwritten areas
of the pedia will go through their own bell curve expansions.

We still have a huge influx of new editors, though very few stick
around. I suspect the ultimate size of the pedia depends at least as
much on the way we treat new editors as it does on the availability of
easily accessible sources.

WereSpielChequers

On 17 February 2011 09:38, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> On 16/02/2011 23:56, Carcharoth wrote:
>> On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 9:54 PM, David Gerard<dgerard at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>
>>> There's a *heck* of a lot still to be written.
>> On that topic, I came across this interesting essay:
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Modelling_Wikipedia_extended_growth
>>
>> It tries to project to the year 2025!
> I'd be interested in any discussion at all on the amount of useful
> material  out there (on the Web) and how it is changing. It is a fact
> that there are more and more reliable sources posted that can be used to
> create articles. This is a factor that affects directly what actually
> gets written, as opposed to what potentially might be a topic to write
> about.
>
> I think we just don't know how much will be around in 2025 that could
> support our work, either in the form of public domain reference
> material, or respectable scholarly webpages to which we can link.
> Extrapolations leaving out this factor aren't worth as much as they
> might be.
>
> Charles
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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
>