I'm with Kerry. By the way, 120 million notable articles are possible, but the estimate is far to be complete, so the real figure is greater for sure. I love these discussions.
2012/10/28 Kerry Raymond <kerry.raym...@gmail.com> > Re: the article. It seems to be one of a number of opinion pieces that > uses the War of 1812 as its primary example. It must be some new scientific > method: proof by War of 1812 :-) > > But more seriously, I think the potential for new articles in Wikipedia is > limited only by the definition of notability, for which the primary > requirement is some good quality sources. So the more that is written, the > more there is to write about in Wikipedia. Even if we restricted ourselves > to new articles on topics notable prior to 2013 (say), we would still have > enormous growth potential. > > Generally Wikipedia has better coverage of contemporary topics than > historical because the WWW provides easy access to more sources for topics > of contemporary notability than for historic notability. But if every > single episode of Seinfeld is notable (as it must be as each has a WP > article!), then surely every book/song/poem/artwork that has ever been > reviewed is notable too. and based on the apparent notability of current > sports people and the results of what seems like every football season, > tennis tournament, atheletics meet, etc, then surely history has plenty of > equally notable articles on similar topics. Jousting tournaments in 1517 in > Avignon, etc. What about race horses? A lot has been written on their > pedigree, form and prospects for centuries. Lots of growth potential there > too. > > History has a wealth of new articles for Wikipedia of at least the same > notability as current subjects. Whether anyone wants to write them or > anyone want to read them, only time will tell. Notability doesn't > necessarily make something interesting to a modern reader. But there is a > massive "long tail" of historically notable topics that could be written > about. > > > Sent from my iPad > > On 28/10/2012, at 8:55 PM, "Yaroslav M. Blanter" <pute...@mccme.ru> wrote: > > > 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 > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Wiki-research-l mailing list > > Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l > -- Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada. E-mail: emijrp AT gmail DOT com Pre-doctoral student at the University of Cádiz (Spain) Projects: AVBOT <http://code.google.com/p/avbot/> | StatMediaWiki<http://statmediawiki.forja.rediris.es> | WikiEvidens <http://code.google.com/p/wikievidens/> | WikiPapers<http://wikipapers.referata.com> | WikiTeam <http://code.google.com/p/wikiteam/> Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/emijrp/
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