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 <[email protected]> wrote: > On 14 February 2011 20:48, Gwern Branwen <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 3:17 PM, David Gerard <[email protected]> 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 > [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l > _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
