2009/2/16 Sage Ross <[email protected]>: > On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 3:40 PM, Thomas Dalton <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> I'm just going by the statistics, I'm not making any judgements based >> on anything else. At the moment, we seem to be following a logistic >> curve which levels out at around 3.5 million articles in around >> 2013-14. (It's asymptotic, but it will be pretty much there by then.) >> > > So far, "low-hanging fruit" has dominated the growth pattern of > Wikipedia. Rather than approaching a horizontal asymptote, we're > probably approaching a stable growth rate (i.e., an oblique > asymptote), since it's obvious that the number of potential articles > yet to be written is not the limiting factor. Rather we're limited by > a product of potential articles and users interested in those > articles. > > But statistically it's probably impossible to know that just from the > data, since low-hanging fruit swamps longer-term trends.
I think we passed to point where low-hanging fruit was a major factor some time ago (probably round about when we started to level out, although it obviously depends on your definitions). I think in a few years the vast majority of existing topics that we want to include will have at least stubs about them. There will be new topics being created all the time, so growth will never stop completely (there will always be a new series of Big Brother to write about!). We might expand our ideas of what kind of articles are acceptable (ie. relax our notability guidelines), but that's the only way we are going to maintain any significant level of article creation about pre-existing topics. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
