On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 1:04 AM, Gwern Branwen <gwe...@gmail.com> wrote:
<snip> > Some of these statistics are old. But I don't know of any newer more > optimistic data. I remain convinced (gut feeling not based on statistics) that Wikipedia growth and development goes in phases, and that after an initial near-exponential growth stage (which we may be exiting) there is a long plateau-like stage where obscure gaps can be filled in. But crucially I think the gaps are larger (take up more room) than the existing framework, and so the time that it will take to fill in the gaps is much longer than people think. Inclusionists (to use the existing terminology that I don't really agree with) think that the eventual size of the encyclopedia will be very large, and others push back against having articles that are too obscure and only marginally supported by a few sources. The strictly source-based approach that insists that most verifiable material can be placed somewhere in the encyclopedia means that you need an army of highly-experienced and top-quality writers and researchers with increasing access to a wide range of sources and who are comfortable using those sources properly to write a compendium of knowledge (i.e. Wikipedia). But I think that phase of the development will take longer than the initial creation (over the past period which is now approaching 10 years). It could take anything up to 50 years (to pick a random figure out of the air). Of course, it might be better to focus efforts on improving the existing articles, but volunteers always work with what takes their fancy. In the end a mixture of approaches is what get used, but I do think that small studies of limited areas to see how they have developed (or even regressed) over a period of years would help give an idea of what count as "progress" here. And I'm not overly worried about admin levels. Editor levels are what is most important, and admins will always emerge from the pool of those that edit. Admins that specialise too much and lose touch with editing are more of a concern, in my opinion. Carcharoth _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
