Wikipedia should have '''1 billion''' articles

Wikipedia should have '''1 billion''' articles

I recently started an article Huáng bǎi, about one of the fifty best-known traditional Chinese medical herbs. I am no expert on the topic, but I wanted to learn. Right now, the vast majority of such herbs have no article at all, beyond perhaps a brief mention of a few properties under the species article if it exists. Most species of Phellodendron have no articles. Most of the chemical compounds isolated from huáng bǎi have no articles. The herbal formulations I find in PubMed have no articles (though Wikipedia does list five others). Only one of the ancient texts recommending these herbs has an article. These are things that no old-time encyclopedia on the bookshelf could find space for, but they are unquestionably things that belong in an encyclopedia if you had the labor force to compose it. And we do... eventually, anyway.

The way I see it, there is immediately room for a ten-fold expansion for just about any technical topic - chemicals, proteins, species, you name it. Once that is done I think we'll find reasons to make another ten-fold expansion based on the technical distinctions that come up. (The methods of measuring berberine and checking for toxic metals in huáng bǎi are just a line each in my article, but they are someone's livelihood; and I didn't even place any information about using it as a dye and preservative for books because the article concerns medical use, and so on) Add another three-fold expansion to allow for splits of the larger articles (even when offset by a hopefully generous increase in article length in the future), and I say we need one billion articles just in order to cover all the things an encyclopedia ought to cover.

For the next five years, plan a continued growth in articles that is directly proportional to the number of active editors, and don't even think about trying to slow it down.

Wnt01:29, 31 January 2010

I think this is a very well-said argument for the potential of Wikimedia projects over the next five years. It took English Wikipedia five years to go from 1 to 3 million articles. It seems fair to expect all Wikimedia projects to have 1 billion articles by 2015.

Eekim18:30, 2 February 2010
 

I don't really expect to get to the billion article mark in five years. But there are some who act as if Wikipedia already has enough articles, and seem to redirect their efforts more to trimming and deleting content, even validly sourced content, just because they think it is out of place. I think we need to keep going full speed ahead for a long, long time.

The true rate of Wikipedia growth will be proportional to the number of editors - and unfortunately, I don't think the statistics from Wikipedia have been updated since 2006. I get the feeling that it's not currently increasing - perhaps even decreasing - and personally I suspect it's because there are too many editors who use the delete button for everything. Wrong article? Don't bother moving, just delete it. Wrong section? Same thing. You don't like the wording? Delete, and then if the person puts it up again, delete it and say he has to talk first, so it takes ten times more talking than editing to get anything done. Too many references? Well, you get the idea... if people have more of a feeling that Wikipedia editing is productive, we should have progressively more editors and we could reach 1 billion by 2030. If laws like the proposal for open access to all federally funded research that's been discussed on whitehouse.gov go through, we could get there more quickly, and better editing tools will also help. But if we stay at the present size under present conditions, it could be many decades just to get 100 million, and we'll never really catch up to cultural events. Wnt 06:41, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

Wnt06:41, 6 February 2010