After the boom, is Wikipedia heading for bust? | Hacker News Reader

After the boom, is Wikipedia heading for bust?

newscientist.com

4 pointsnjrc7 comments

I'm not sure why this is surprising. There are already articles on most every topic that I tend to search for, at the very least there is usually a stub. Getting all of the long tail will take some time, but it won't require many new articles per month.

Also, I wonder if they checked any languages other than English. Some of those may still be in the rapid growth stage.

I do think there is some merit to their argument regarding newbie unfriendliness. There's a large contingent of established editors who are very vigorous about enforcing the notability guidelines. It doesn't help that the guidelines are somewhat broken in some regards, especially for internet content.

On the other hand, there is a point at which the low hanging fruit articles have already been written. In areas of science or math, for example, wikipedia's coverage far, far exceeds my own knowledge of the subject. In many cases, I suspect that in many areas there is little besides formatting or editorial fixes that can be added without already having a phd in the subject. And while this is certainly a great thing for the quality and comprehensiveness of the encyclopedia, it doesn't help when you are looking at the number of new pages being written.

no, 99.999999999999999999999999999% of people who go to wikipedia are there to read. Only a tiny minority actually modifies articles

That would mean that less than everyone on earth edits wikipedia, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

/humour

No, after google wikipedia is the next page I visit most on a daily basis.

I say google should buy them and profit from ads, millions of them.

Add more eyeballs to their web properties.

Same here. In fact, if I'm looking for information on a specific subject I will most often go straight to Wikipedia as they have an article on what I'm looking for in 99% of the cases. Especially if I'm looking for just a general overview of a subject, even technical ones. If the subject is more general, or loosely defined (sentence, error message etc.) I use Google.

Wikipedia is stocked full of FOSS fundamentalists. Selling ads on Wikipedia, or trying to buy it (from who?) would only force some combination of a fork and a mass exodus.

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