[WikiEN-l] Re: Paper is not paper

Wed Oct 5 12:30:58 UTC 2005

On 05/10/05, BJörn Lindqvist <bjourne at gmail.com> wrote:
> I heard one that the total sum of all human knowledge has doubled very
> second year for the past few decades. As in: The scientists doing
> research between 2003 - 2005 learned more things than everything they
> knew in the beginning of 2003. So if we want to keep Wikipedia's
> coverage as broad and deep as it is today, the number of articles have
> to double every other year.

Doubling every other year is a 40% year-on-year increase. According to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm en.wiki
seems to have been increasing article count at circa 6% per month for
much of the year, assuming it hasn't significantly changed recently.
6% per month constant growth is - roughly - 100% year-on-year
increase. By wordcount, it was going up... hmm, let's call it 7.5% and
be conservative. That's roughly a 140% increase year-on-year.

At current rates, then, we're growing much faster than scientific
knowledge is! That said, I have my doubts over the figure - it sounds
far too hard to quantify, and a little too neat to be true. Maybe it's
quantifying raw data generation? That I could well believe. (Did I
ever point this list to the video of Lessig's talk at Fermilab? I must
dig up my notes on it)

Mind you, it's a pretty good metric - doubling over two years is
definitely the kind of thing we'd want a good healthy project to be
doing. If you want to use this metric in future, a handy rule of thumb
is that any wiki which grows at *3% or more* a month, in your
favourite way of counting "size", will a little more than double over
two years. Feel free to use this to encourage people...

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk