The latest edition of the promotional e-rag Wikipedia Signpost has an article about the "Wikipedia is Failing" essay. This is in itself unremarkable (though amusing, to read the various bannings, unbannings, moves, un-moves, AFDs and whatnot). However it contains this quote:

"Wikipedia has shown sustained exponential growth"

I have to say that I laughed so hard I nearly wet my pants. "Sustained exponential growth"! How long before Wikipedia has an article for each atom in the universe? Enquiring minds want to know!

Not to mention that the response essay seems to think 1.6 million articles is an indisputable sign of quality...

Hmm, "Universe Atom No. 34,257,357,863,204,034,432,126" might make a good Uncyclopedia article. It could go into all sorts of details about where the atom was during various times in history, and "what the future holds" for this particular atom... Of course, there would have to be "Controversy" and "Criticism of This Atom" sections...

Hey, does anyone know if the 1.6 million figure includes redirects? And if so, what's the percentage? I assume it includes disambiguations and saltings of deleted pages, but I doubt there's more than a few thousand of those...

The "stub" count is insanely high also, but I that's a stat I saw once and wouldn't be able to track down easily.

...not to mention the seemingly endless talk page debates and AfDs about the notability of that particular atom.

Seriously, though, it may be a logistic curve - starts out looking like exponential, then slows down as it nears its natural ceiling and approaches it asymptotically. Maybe 5 million articles tops?

Doing a bit of digging, I found this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dantheox/Stub_percentages

Year out of date, but too much couldn't have changed.

Quite a lot has. The number of articles has grown from under a million to over 1.6 million. and I expect that the proportion of stubs has grown.

To be fair, many of the stubs are probably quite long enough and don't really need expansion.

I should have phrased it as that I don't expect that percentage to be any lower, though probably a bit higher, but no more than 45%.

If the trends continue, the stub % should grow a bit, but it seems to becoming asymptotic given the chart.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wik...ct_Stub_sorting

its likely been mentioned in this pages talk page.