Wikipedia:WikipediaWeekly/Episode42

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Participants:
 * Andrew Lih
 * Tawker
 * Liam
 * The Placebo Effect

News
"For me, Foundation-l has becoming incresasingly useless as a mailing list because it is so frequently dominated by people who seem to be very "bitter and mean-spirited" to the point that they are on the attack no matter what happens. Open dialog and debate is fine. Criticism is fine. But a minority of people endlessly beating others up without bothering to stop and "assume good faith" just a little bit now and then just makes the list useless." Posts 97 From: "Thomas Dalton"     -- 3 posts per day 60 From: "Brian McNeil"      -- 2 posts per day 55 From: "David Gerard" 51 From: Anthony 47 From: GerardM 36 From: Ray Saintonge 34 From: geni 26 From: Florence Devouard 23 From: "Robert Rohde" 23 From: Marc Riddell 21 From: Dan Rosenthal 21 From: "Andrew Gray"
 * Muhammad article
 * Could Wikimania be moved?
 * Appointment of Erik Moeller as Deputy Director
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-12-17/M%C3%B6ller_move
 * 2 new board members
 * Extended to January 3
 * $1.2 million raised
 * Audit
 * Danny says WMF is in decline like an empire
 * Foundation-L a "cesspool" and solutions?
 * Jimbo: [Foundation-l] Moderation and this list
 * List
 * Citizendium choose CC-BY-SA 3.0 "unported" for its license
 * 22,000 word essay by Sanger
 * "There were also two issues that go to evaluating the impact of the different licenses on levels of participation. The first may be boiled down to this: while academics in general do not especially know or care about the difference between commercial and noncommercial free licenses, the free culture crowd, which makes up another large constituency, cares deeply and passionately about the difference. We will probably have more disaffected contributors if we choose a noncommercial license than if we choose a commercial one. The second issue concerns the impact of the license on our relationship with Wikipedia; and, in sum, it seems likely that our choosing a commercial license would lead to a more vigorous exchange of contributors between Wikipedia and the Citizendium, something that could help us considerably. There is no good reason to think it will harm us."

.anaconda Andre Engels (hmmm, not so new) Dungodung Jusjih Lar Millosh Spacebirdy Thogo Wpedzich Zirland DerHexer Nick1915
 * Stewards election results announced
 * What is a steward - "elected by the international community to manage contributors' user rights on all wikis operated by the Wikimedia Foundation... Stewards can assign or remove all user rights, including bot, administrator, bureaucrat, oversight, checkuser, and steward. This position was created to disassociate rights management from development."
 * New list -
 * Encyclopedia of life
 * 2 print encyclopedias not publishing cause of wikipedia

Growth of Wikipedia
- There's only so many articles you can actually make -- a lot of people see wikipedia as being "finished", in a way. Once you conquer everything, what is left to conquer?

- "All the virgin areas have at least been addressed", right? In terms of the knowledge of humanity. And you're kind of replenishing things on top of it that are current events, and you might be shoring up some parts of it, but the major work has been done. So how does the project survive when most of the work has been done?

- I'll quote that back to you in 20 years, fuzzy, when wikipedia is -- you know, owns its own mountain. Like that famous guy who closed down the patent office in like 1890 and said "oh, there's nothing left to invent; it's just a classification scheme from now on".

- I understand that sentiment, but you have to admit that with 2 million-some articles, most of the sum of human knowledge has been put down on virtual paper in Wikipedia. Right? You can't argue against that. That is a fact!

- No. I argue against that.

- The sister projects also have a big reach that they have to cover -- wikispecies, wikiquotes, wikiversity.

- But I think that's one of the fallacies of the wikiprojects -- that you can suddenly turn to these people who are interested in writing about Pokemon and sex acts and cartoons and Naruto and say "now, take the time that you had, and start making a taxonomy of human life". No -- you just can't do that, because they're not interested in it. Or "come in and write definitions".

- It's because those people who were interested in those things were the first to arrive, the first adopters of Wikipedia. But millions of people out there -- think of the academics in religious studies. They haven't caught on to this yet, they haven't come to this. When the baby boomers all start retiring and have the time to actually edit Wikipedia, and they know it and they're used to the idea, they'll fill out all their stuff. There are whole areas that aren't nearly as covered as Naruto and molecular biology, and we're all aware of that. It doesn't mean that we're nearly finished, and we don't need to take those people who were on Naruto and divert them onto this new topic. There's lots more to be done.

- Well, I think there's more to be done. I'm not sure there's lots more to be done, that's the thing.

- There's heaps more -- we've just scratched the surface.

- No, I think we're 80% done with the surface (laughs). The sum of human knowledge is a finite thing, right? It's growing, but it's finite.

- No! No!

- What about the articles that'll happen about future events, crazy kids who have parties and get themselves arrested and stuff like that?

- But then that becomes current events, keeping up with the headlines. And that's my passion, I love writing articles about current events as a role in history of what's going on, but if we have 2-point-some million articles now, do you see it being 20 million articles in five years?

- Yes!

- You do? I actually don't.

- What else is there to write about?

- We're seeing the top of the S-curve already, Liam! We've already done podcasts about this. We're hitting the top of the S-curve, you can see that in the statistics. You can't make it to 20 million in five years given the curve we see now.

- Tell me in five years. Tell me the same thing in five years.

- Alright; this is a virtual handshake.

- You can't be the patent office man and say, "i know what's going to happen in the future". I can't tell you which articles haven't been made, because they haven't been made yet.

- The difference is that with patents, with creating inventions, that's synthesis. It's creating new things out of elements that you have right now. If you're talking about the sum of all human knowledge, that's a very different enterprise. You're documenting what is known in the known world. It's finite, but it's growing -- but it's not growing at the exponential rate all the time, it's not infinitely growing in exponential ways.

- But you're assuming that the only way wikipedia would grow is by adding new articles.

- Well, it has to, unless you think that the cat article should grow from five pages to ten pages to 20 pages to fifty pages.

- Or we get more loose with our standards and we allow every single thing ever to become an article.

- Quantity does not equal quality.

- I agree with you somewhat and I think there's going to be a new type of article. You already have articles about africa, then you have articles about the economics of africa; and then you're going to have comparisons of african economics to blah blah blah, or "the evolution of african economics through history". So you're going to have some "analysis" articles that are growing --

- -- precisely. Precisely.

- Those type of things might grow, but those are tougher to write. And that's why I think the growth will be somewhat limited.

- They'll be tougher to write and they'll be slower to write, but they're just as important!

- I agree.

- If not more important. We've got the article on africa, and we've got the article on cat, but we haven't got the article on all types of variants in the history of the cat, or the economy of africa, or whatever.

- We'll have a special gambling episode where we all bet on how much we think it's going to grow in the future. There used to be a pool on wikipedia that predicted when we're going to hit 1 million, 5 million, etc. I think it's still around, and we should take a look at that.

- And not just there was a page called the "millionth article pool", which was not just when it was but what that article would be entitled. (laughter)

- There's also the final article pool. (laughter)

- The final article pool. What is the last article in wikipedia going to be about?

- 42!

Top 100

 * Wikirage - Top 100 most edited
 * WikiCharts - Top 100 read


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