Considering a, you have this fine study by Emijrp :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Emijrp/All_human_knowledge
Apparently a would be roughly around 120 000 000.
As media coverage and scientific research become most efficient every
year, I suspect that b is contantly growing, and follow a geometric
progression. Yet I don't know how to figure that out in concrete:
perhaps something like 100 000 * 1,05^n.
100 000 being a low estimation regarding the current growth of
knowledge (new biological species, new people, new political issues,
new scientific concepts and discoveries…).
PCL
We have a new article in The Atlantic,
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/surmounting-the-insurmountable-wikipedia-is-nearing-completion-in-a-sense/264111/
(which btw I found following Dario's twitter, @ReaderMeter, which I
recommend)
and this is still the same story of whether we achieved the limit of
what can be written etc). Without going into details of this
animated debate (I have smth to say, for instance, I just created
two articles which have about a hundred red links, and the material
to fill in these red links is available, but this will lead us away
from the topic), I am curious, if anybody ever tried to estimate
what is the possible number of notable topics for articles. On the
short time scale, it should grow linearly with time, since we have
new sports events, elections, TW shows, movies, books etc, and many
persons who previously not been notable become notable. Thus, this
number must be
N = a + b (t-2012),
where a is the number of topics notable now, t is the time in years,
and b is the number of new topics which become notable every year.
Was there any research on what order of magnitude a and b have? I
guess b must be in the order of dozens of thousands, since we are
talking about people. What is a? Is it dominated by the number of
species of insects, or cosmic bodies, or what?
I tried to ask this question several years ago in Russian Wikipedia,
but there was no concluding answer.
Cheers
Yaroslav
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