Is Wikipedia saturated? Yep For a year, at least. | Hacker News Reader

Is Wikipedia saturated? Yep For a year, at least.

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33 pointsgritzko27 comments

The graph of total revisions-per-month shows: the English part of the Wikipedia is saturated: no more exponential growth!

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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.

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.

I assume "having an article" and the notability requirements are to keep the site from being overrun by fanboys.

That's a great point. I think perhaps this is exemplary of the notion that they are still confined to their previous paradigm of "encyclopedia" instead of infinite knowledge base.

A good solution to this would be to introduce levels of specificity to Wikipedia such that what we currently have is the first level, and then the second level would be catered towards individuals who have more than a lay perspective, and then the next successive level would be for experts and so forth.

Perhaps this would require different levels of editorship as well, but it is definitely an approach that might give a better organization to Wikipedia that is not flat as is exemplified by traditional encyclopedias.

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.

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

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

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

I concur. I've known people who have wanted to add information to wikipedia and then go, "Why bother? It'll just get reverted by wikipedia moderators or something. Waste of my time."

Not to mention that, even when you state something as obvious as 2 + 2 equals 4, some anxious amateur editor will add a [citation needed], along with a few other deprecating warnings.

Well, citations are pretty important.

Case in point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_Mine:_Adam_Freeland

Within a day, two requests to delete filed for different reasons, equally bullshit - probably because both requests were filed by bots. The burden of proof should NOT be 100% on the writer. When an article can be "speedy deleted" with no evidence of a good reason, there's something seriously wrong.

And it does make you wonder: "why do I waste my time?"

I'm actually curious if Wikipedia is more deletionist or if its an artifact of everyone having made/contributed to a page they care about, so when they delete, you actually notice.

(That being said, I too think its lame.)

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.

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.

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.

Tough Call. But on the whole I think a bad idea.

use your own site/publishing space for your own unique takes on a story

I remember when the majority of information on the Internet was on individual pages/sites; a fanpage on geocities was the appropriate place for a list of the things McGyver built. At the rate of growth it has seen, eventually Wikipedia will contain more information than the Internet (and Facebook will have more users than the Internet does).

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

I had assumed this is by design.

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.

Yes, that's why I still read the Britannica article for those topics which have entries.

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

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.

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.

Well it had to peak sometime...

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