

Is Wikipedia saturated? Yep For a year, at least. - gritzko
http://oc-co.org/?p=124
The graph of total revisions-per-month shows: the English part of the Wikipedia is saturated: no more exponential growth!
======
fiaz
There is still PLENTY of knowledge that can be included into Wikipedia, but
there are too few main editors to actually refine/expand upon the articles. To
imply Wikipedia is "saturated" and that it now must grow linearly (because the
past year reveals this pattern) is as ridiculous to say that human knowledge
is perhaps saturated and must grow linearly because we have not collectively
broken out of prevailing models of perception.

I believe that this flat trend (in a larger exponential curve that has yet to
reveal itself) is a lack of initiative/participation for the moment that has
zero predictive value of revealing the nature of Wikipedia's future growth
rate.

~~~
biohacker42
But isn't a large part of it the fact they are working to reproduce an
encyclopedia? Shelf space, and to a lesser extent paper, are limited resources
so encyclopedia must naturally draw a line somewhere.

Why on earth is Wikipedia sticking so closely to that model, when they are not
limited by shelf space or paper, is anyone's guess.

~~~
joshu
I do wish wikipedia had a notion of sub-wikis so that all the fictional domain
pages (the comicbook universes, Star Wars, etc) would be subsumed into one
place.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
That is what the whole Wikia federation is about, isn't it?

~~~
joshu
Wikia and Wikipedia are separated. Feels like there's a lot of duplication as
well.

------
rsheridan6
This is hardly surprising, given the rise of the deletionists over the past
few years.

~~~
mynameishere
This needs an actual fix. I've often thought it should be acceptable to fork
articles. Thus, there's the official "Battle of the Bulge" or "History of the
Atari 2600" link (or whatever), and then there are 0.. _n_ others written by
different historians or amateurs who have a divergent, possibly incorrect or
extreme view.

~~~
william42
That would be a horrible idea. It would no longer be Wikipedia. It would
become more like 4chan for encyclopedia articles. Stopping spammers and
vandals would become exponentially harder with that, and to be honest I think
that's a bigger problem than Wikipedia editors deleting some guy's webcomic
article.

~~~
mynameishere
Well, it's sort of a variation on google's Knol. The "forked" articles would
in a sense be no more significant than the text currently hidden behind the
"discussion" button, but it would allow dissenting people a more formal
platform.

------
adrianwaj
Is it just me or does every Wikipedia article feel like it's written by the
same person?

~~~
litewulf
I had assumed this is by design.

~~~
Herring
Having multiple editors tends to bury any 1 editor's signal. The eventual
style can be very easy to read once you learn to extract information from it
efficiently.

------
marvin
Wikipedia is at least as saturated as its administrators want it to be.

------
kennyroo
I'm starting to re-think the whole Wikipedia thing.

I've been using the site for research related to my online travel site, and
I've noticed a lot of facts and figures that are either outdated, slightly
off-the-mark, or just plain wrong. Without an update schedule or paid staff,
some of the content goes stale very quickly. I suspect this will worsen over
time.

None would be glaringly obvious to a casual reader (e.g. the number of rooms
at certain Las Vegas resorts is wrong, the current ownership status of some
casinos is outdated), but God forbid that people take it for truth.

I updated a couple of entries myself, but I no longer trust it on the whole.

~~~
litewulf
I think it'd be nice if wikipedia made it more obvious when something had been
last updated, or some sort of micro-info-graphic representing freshness. Or
something.

------
Herring
Well it had to peak sometime...

