Comments on: Wikipedia doubling time

By: Hamilton Lovecraft

Hamilton Lovecraft — Tue, 02 May 2006 15:06:31 +0000

Among other things, such a system would replace Google for many purposes

Wikipedia has already replaced Google as my first go-to for answering questions of the form “what the heck is X, exactly?”, but Google was never particularly good at that question, instead directing me to pages which answer the question “what does some loon with no sense of design have to say about X?”

I don’t see Wikipedia being able to cut much further into Google’s turf than that, though.

By: dipnut

dipnut — Mon, 01 May 2006 19:46:27 +0000

I had noticed it was getting harder and harder to read them all.

By: abb1

abb1 — Mon, 01 May 2006 12:38:08 +0000

So, why aren't the non-English wikipedias growing as dramatically as the English version? According to this graph it looks like the Geman version may have already leveled.

By: Ajax

Ajax — Mon, 01 May 2006 11:57:39 +0000

Open source production is fine if the topic you are seeking is something which interests the open-source producing community. If not, and if you want something for free, then you have to endure Wikipedia’s wholesale copy of the out-of-date 1911 EB when looking, for instance, for information about Elizabethan English poets. Comparing Wikipedia to ODNB, you get what you pay for.

By: Sharon

Sharon — Mon, 01 May 2006 08:48:37 +0000

Comparisons to ODNB hardly seem appropriate. Wikipedia didn’t cost 25 million quid to produce, and it won’t set you back 200 UK pounds (or 300 USD) a year for a personal subscription.

On the other hand, you should read some of the complaints about errors in the new ODNB…

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Mon, 01 May 2006 02:32:19 +0000

Sharply, but unconvincingly. All they did was argue the toss on the calls that went against them. They didn’t make a case for systematic error in the Nature study.

By: Tom T.

Tom T. — Mon, 01 May 2006 01:19:15 +0000

By the way, Britannica responded quite sharply to the Nature article that concluded that Britannica made as many errors as Wikipedia.

By: Ajax

Ajax — Sun, 30 Apr 2006 20:12:45 +0000

On the contrary, Stuart, the Wikipedia entries lifted from EB 1911 are not confined to articles about obscure people in the 19th century, but seem to include lots of less obscure people from earlier centuries. If one is interested in tech subjects Wikipedia is fine, but not many Silicon Valley geek contributors to Wikipedia know all that much about Renaissance English Catholic recusant poets. For information about British people, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is generally a much better source of information (up-to-date, extensive, written by experts, checked, references included) than Wikipedia.

By: stuart

stuart — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 15:09:14 +0000

EB 1911 edition had approximately 40,000 entries (a number which Wikipedia currently adds in a couple of weeks), so I doubt that could ever have been a limiting factor or even a particularly large boost to the project except very early on. The main advantage of EB 1911 in wikipedia is covering now obscure figures from the 19th century that otherwise there would otherwise likely be no article for.

By: Mike in Arkansas

Mike in Arkansas — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 12:37:30 +0000

While I have occasionally used Wikipedia, linked to Wikipedia articles, and even edited a couple of articles, until reading this post I had not really considered what Wikipedia really is and how it came to be. Wikipedia has an interesting article on itself that explains a lot of this.

By: ~~~~

~~~~ — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 10:19:45 +0000

Ajax – merging the 14,707 1911 Brittanica topics that did not have articles on wikipedia was completed on February 27.

By: French Swede the Rootless Vegetable

French Swede the Rootless Vegetable — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 09:47:05 +0000

'I really like this kind of thing, so feel free to nominate more of the same.' Since people have mentioned Borges, I wonder when Wikipedia will be as comprehensive as the Library of Babel?

By: ~~~~

~~~~ — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 09:46:54 +0000

The millionth article was created on March 1!

By: Ajax

Ajax — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 09:44:39 +0000

Given how many Wikipedia articles are straight copies from the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, perhaps the real constraint on the former’s growth is the size of the latter.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 05:55:44 +0000

Pointing out that logistic curves look exponential at first is easy. The fun part (note the posting category) is to work out the upper bound.