2009/2/16 Eugene van der Pijll <[email protected]>: > Thomas Dalton schreef: >> I've been following the CZ statistics page for some time, and I get >> the feeling that it doesn't matter because activity on CZ is shrinking >> (even Sanger doesn't seem very active) and it will never reach a size >> where anyone actually uses it. > > I've had a bit of an argument with him recently about the decline of CZ > (http://blog.citizendium.org/2009/02/04/write-a-thon-is-on-independent-notices/) > and he assured me that CZ has been growing exponentially, and will be > growing explosively, and that [[CZ:Statistics]] proved that.
I don't see a claim of exponential growth (which would be complete rubbish), just "good news". I don't think linear growth (even slightly below linear) is good news, personally. >> It's a fraction of the size of >> Wikipedia at the same age (in terms of articles or total words) and >> growth is slowing (whereas Wikipedia showed exponential growth at that >> time). > > CZ is actually only about half WP's size at the same age, I think. I've > plotted the growth of both sites in number of words, and it is a > surpising difference. CZ started much larger than WP because they > imported a lot of WP articles[*], and then grew linearly. After a year, > both encyclopedias were the same size, but because of WP's exponential > growth, it is now outpacing CZ. > > CZ's growth in number of words has only just begun to fall; its lack of > new authors has been a problem for a much larger time. My calculations come out as about 1/10 the size by articles and 1/3 the size by words (so their articles must be longer on average). It doesn't really matter, though, when you have exponential vs linear, the exponential is always going to win regardless of precise numbers. (Of course, we're not growing exponentially any more, so I guess it's possible they could eventually catch up, but we're talking decades...) >> We could discuss why it failed but I think the real answer is >> simply that Wikipedia is "good enough" so there is very little >> interest in a new project doing the same thing (and which won't be >> anywhere near as useful for several years, even with the more generous >> assumptions). > > Could be. To succeed, a new encyclopedia will have to either have a very > dedicated team of authors, or find a specialistic niche (scholarpedia?), > or be useful from the start; perhaps by starting off with WP's entire > content. And I don't think we have seen WP's successor yet. A dedicated team of authors won't do it - Wikipedia grew exponentially because as it got bigger more people read it and more readers became writers. If all the writing is done by a set team the growth will only even be linear. A specialist niche is another matter entirely - wikis are good for all kinds of things, it's only the market for wiki general encyclopaedias that is filled. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
