On 28/03/2010, Carcharoth <carcharot...@googlemail.com> wrote: > On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 5:02 PM, Ian Woollard <ian.wooll...@gmail.com> >> I think a lot of people get involved to write new articles. It looks >> like 2007 was 'peak oil' for new articles; after that it was getting >> harder to find new articles to write; about half of the articles that >> were realistically likely to be covered, were already covered. > > Does it make sense to say this when *thousands* of articles are being > created every day?
We're currently looking at about a net increase of about 1200 articles per day. and seems to be falling. > Where does the idea even come from that "about half > of the articles that were realistically likely to be covered, were > already covered"? The question that needs to be asked is whether the > "New articles per day" statistic is a measure of the articles being > created, or the articles that are still there as having been created > on that day, a set period (e.g. a year) after being created? i.e. Is > the rate of article deletion included or excluded from those figures? The idea comes from a mixture of looking at the statistics peak and looking at the articles that still are needed. Nearly all of the low-hanging fruit is clearly gone now. Most of the mid-hanging fruit is also now gone. We're getting towards the top of the tree, things are getting more obscure. This is a *good* thing, not having so many holes in the Wikipedia! > My view is that the rate of article creation and the number of > "missing" articles depends *heavily* on the topic area. Some topic > areas are very well covered, others are not so well covered. In the > former areas, you will indeed struggle to find new articles to create, > but there are some areas (history in particular) where there are > thousands (probably tens of thousands) of articles still needed. I'm sure you're correct. So if there's twenty or thirty other similar areas, then we're looking at a under a million articles left to write. We're currently at 3.2 million. I think we'll exceed 4 million within a few years. > could easily make lists hundreds of items long of things that an > article could be written on (this is limited mainly by the time I have > to compile such lists), mostly on historical subjects, but also a fair > amount of contemporary stuff as well. Seriously. Pick any topic and I > can guarantee that a list of ten new articles for that topic area > would be easy to compile. > > Just as an example, I was taking part in the Military History World > War I contest recently, and there were at least 43 new articles > created (or expanded) for DYK. I'm currently trying to work out how > many articles were actually created (as opposed to expanded). That's not very many compared to 3.2 million articles, but I don't mean to knock it in any way, just trying to put things into perspective. > A better approach would be to look at samples of article creation and > see what articles are being created and that will give you an idea of > where the gaps are being filled in and hence how big the gaps are. This IS the point though; we're now looking for the gaps. That's exactly what I'm saying. The Wikipedia should more or less run out of gaps in about 3 years (ish- but it's never going to completely run out, but growth from existing knowledge will be progressively slower and slower). OTOH the circle of knowledge is still growing, at a somewhat slower rate. > Carcharoth -- -Ian Woollard _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l