NOTE: I am not putting this in the 'Guy' folder as it relates to a claim often made here. Guy says:



Hoary, and a host of others, soon pick up on this.



I made a similar point when I red-linked [[Medieval semantics]] in my election questions. The same article is masterfully treated in the SEP

http://www.science.uva.nl/~seop/entries/semiotics-medieval

Wikipedia has a very long way to go if it wants to be an encyclopedia.

There's thousands of missing articles. I'd even go to say there's probably millions missing. And there will always be new things to write about.

Perhaps Guy will claim, like Charles Buell, to have been misquoted.

Bless Guy's heart, but that's a mystifyingly boneheaded thing to say.

This reminds us of the apocryphal quote from Charles Duell, a Patent Office employee who was thought to have declared in 1899 that there was "nothing left to invent."

In reality, no one would ever say anything quite so stupid.... except Guy.


Help! Kelly Martin has gained access to my innermost thoughts and bland, hyperlinked observations in order to scoop me on obscure internet messageboards.

I quit, and I'm never coming back.

For the record, there's a similar conversation going on here, without the drama and shouting that being on Giano's talkpage attracts.

I think Guy made use of that little thing called "Hyperbole". There are plenty of articles to write up. Maybe not to start, if they're stubs already or whatever, but thats not stopping anyone from turning a 50-300 word article into a 7,000 word proper page, if they wanted to. And not just "bands", which I have no idea why he tossed that out there.

Well, I disagree. Guy was right saying that there is not much to edit in Wikipedia for people "lack any understanding at all of anything other than the mores of their own town". That is obviously true, I would even say it's trivial.

The only interesting question is whether Guy is talking about his own editor experience

That's an interesting and valuable discussion - I didn't realise there was a problem with getting contributors. But the most extraordinary thing it was started by Avruch, who has just blocked a prolific content contributor i.e. yours truly. What planet he on?

Yea, there are zillions of "remote" articles to be written, but the better known articles are at standstill mode, and many are degenerating. Most of the editors do not want to work on 'little know subjects', many want to edit the "big ones". That's why the thing is going nowhere, and that's why it's doomed, that's why the squabbles continue. Jimbo has yet to understand that if WP does not change, it will perish, as it appears to be the case.

"Give the prisoners something meaningful to do, Jimbo!!"

The problem here is that The Faithful are unwilling to use the necessary wording to make statements like this completely accurate. If Mr. Chapman had written, "there are now so few unspoiled or new content territories left to colonize, or recently-abandoned content territories to take over, that the vast majority or new Wikipedia users who lack highly specialized knowledge have nothing other than current affairs, policy disputes, and robot-like vandal fighting to use for in-game point-scoring and self-promotion," then he would have had a statement that any realist could easily agree with.

As it is, he's still pretty close! The key thing is that there may indeed be zillions of articles left to be written, but if they already exist in the form of stubs, then the effect on a new user is almost the same as if the article were completely "finished." And new articles in already-colonized content territories (or "topic areas") are no good either, since the original colonizers will simply impose themselves on the new user's content like so many magpies. And of course, the more obscure the article subject, the less desirable that subject is as a means of establishing oneself. Users who are already established (particularly if they're admins) don't really want to accept that, since it doesn't fit into the preferred "Wikipedian" view of how the system should work.

The system lives and dies on the basis of territorialism. The psychology is that of a Land Rush, and once the land rush is complete, that's when the lawyers and politicians take over. In the meantime, someone who's looking for his own little Happy Valley isn't going to be all that pleased when he's told that there's nothing but a few square feet of scrub desert left, because everything else has been taken.

Pure codswallop. If this were true I would not be able to create stubs on enwiki which already have five, six, or seven interwiki links (often a commons gallery too).

That was stupid. If a new editor thinks there's nothing left to work on, they should go to [[WP:VITAL]]. Sure, we've got articles on the 1000 most vital topics but most of them completely suck. When over half the encyclopedia is featured articles, then we can start thinking about how little there is to work on.

And who actually made up this silly list?

My test is, if I look at my own area of expertise, and it is nonsense, then the same probably applies to the other areas about which I now less, or nothing at all.

No offense, but I think you're missing the point. No matter what state an existing article is in, the mere fact that the article exists at all will scare off roughly 97 percent of potential new users who might have otherwise written a version of their own. The other 3 percent are likely to get banned for trying. Moreover, of that 97 percent, only about 1 or 2 percent will be capable of improving on the existing article if it's already in a somewhat finished state, unless it just happens to be unusually bad.

This is a completely predictable aspect of maintenance-phase ergonomics. The number of new users will continue to decline, because the existence of articles on most subjects will scare most of them away. Established users will tire of dealing with the small percentage of new users who aren't scared away, and many of them will burn out, having passed the 18-month window a long time ago. Those who remain, or who are really there mostly for gamesmanship, politics and drama, will eventually push the system into the lockdown phase, and that'll be it. Game Over, and nothing left to argue about other than the pointlessness of the whole effort, or the occasional "notable" current event.

To me, the question should be this: Will occasional "notable" current events, combined with newly-produced movies, books, TV series, and music CD's/downloads, be enough to keep people interested once all content territories are spoken for?

Durova has a blog post about this.

http://durova.blogspot.com/2008/11/brave-new-articles.html

Yeah, there's no shortage of stuff to work on that is mainstream, and even "popular", but that no one has simply gotten to. You can't just roll up on [[Barack Obama]], and drop in one edit a whole new version you wrote offline. However, if someone had the time, skill, and motivation they could do a slew of high end Featured Content on a regular basis, for content of a scholarly nature. Even better, since it's all GFDL, you could do anything you wanted with it later, and get an audience for your work. Good or bad? Who knows. But the point is that if you have a hobby or interest, and the skill, you can pretty much write the de facto accepted mainstream authority on it.

Good example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cla68#Content

I don't think we will reach a point where that is a meaningful question, certainly not any time soon.

But if we do I think a more systematic way to revisit deleted articles would be the next logical step.

I think there are still a good amount of unwritten articles to draw upon. We still lack articles about vast chunks of Chinese, Russian, Indian, Ottoman, Arabic and African history, for example. And to take a more positive look at the future, I actually think the closing of Wikipedia's frontier a la Manifest Destiny will enhance the content overall. Rather that expanding horizontally by creating tons of stubs, the community is beginning to shift towards building vertically and improving the articles we already have.

In the last year, I've seen many of Wikipedia's core articles either become FAs or improve vastly nonetheless. Virus, John McCain, Alzheimer's disease, Panic of 1907 and Romeo and Juliet were promoted just within the last six months. In January we saw U2, Ming Dynasty, Suleiman the Magnificent, Edgar Allen Poe, Hamlet and Vampire promoted. February promoted the star Sirius, Planet and Dwarf plant, Edward VII, Oxygen, Atom and Emily Dickenson. In March? Grover Cleveland, Neptune, Genetics, Ancient Egypt and Cannon. And the improvement's not just happening in core articles. Obscure topics like Catherine de Medici's building projects, French Texas, D.B. Cooper, 1962 South Vietnamese Independence Palace bombing and Kannada literature in the Western Chalukya Empire have also risen to FA status.

Many other articles are rising rapidly. Take a look at the difference between our articles on the British Empire, the Han Dynasty, History of the Earth and Oil tanker to see how the building is going.

My projection is as follows: yes, we'll eventually reach an article equivalent of peak oil, where we'll continue to produce new articles but not as often, not as high quality and never as plentiful as we previously have. We'll probably lose a lot of editors, either due to lack of interest or fatigue. But we'll also see increased specialization. Editors like Berig, who over the past year has built up the Norse mythology articles from craptasticness to awesomeness, and PericlesofAthens, who tirelessly improves every facet of the Chinese history articles, will become the norm instead of the exception.

Granted, the infighting will stay the same. But at this point, unless ArbCom either ponies up and begins banning troublemakers en masse or collapses like a dying star to the point of meaninglessness, that's pretty much immutable and not one of my top concerns as an editor.

It is just this sort of selective analysis and Pollyanna-ish belief amongst the vested contributors to WP that ensures that there will never be any significant reform to WP, and thus puts the seal on WP's doom.

Hasten The Day!™

You're exactly right and I'm surprised that more people haven't realized this. If there's a certain subject that someone is interested in in WP and it's not too controversial, then you can easily become the primary editor of that subject in Wikipedia. As long as you stick to the rules, such as NPOV and the format policies, you'll basically have a free hand to develop all the articles in that subject as you think they should be developed.

A few years ago, I assumed that Wikipedia would continue to grow through mass participation and that before long everything would be devotedly watched, maintained, and developed by groups of editors. But that hasn't happened; the dropout/burnout rate is atrociously high and it turns out that it's very difficult to integrate a substantial portion of Wikipedia's ocean of readers into the editing culture. The result is that it's very easy to go it alone and develop content without anybody else really caring--perhaps without even noticing that the content is being developed at all. That's a bad thing for the project as a whole, but it's a good thing for the individual editor who wants a free hand to shape content according to his own preferences.

Do I need to lecture you about the articles dealing with vacuum tubes?
I posted MY problems with the subject, as WP has handled it, here and here.

You, sir, are every bit as immature as the people you criticize. If not moreso.
If you cared about that "encyclopedia", you would resign your adminship immediately.

Number of articles remaining to be written >= Number of people who have ever lived - Number of people who currently have an article on Wikipedia.

You missed the whole point. If I'm Pollyanna, then you're Chicken Little. You have no proof of any sort of editorial exodus, no slow-down in article improvement, no statistics of decline, nothing to argue your case of Wikipedia's supposedly impending collapse. Selectively cutting out my proof and dismissing it as "Jimboganda" is juvenile and counter-intuitive to an actual discussion.

The "editorial exodus" (or not) part, at least, is measurable, based on the number of editors qualified to vote in each Arbcom election, and the time taken for each "block" of x edits to be made. As I understand it there's a downward trend but not a spectacular nosedive – IIRC it's fallen about 5% per annum for the last couple of years. (For those who understand the statistics, there are lots of pretty graphs here.) To avoid filling this thread with a long post, my thoughts (and those of others) on the matter are here.

Actually, there was no "proof" to cut out. Just a list of names of some articles that were recently given "FA status" and few rosy predictions in the Jimbo Wales mold. If you do want to discuss in detail whether or not WP is destroying itself, you can take a look at this thread on that very subject.