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

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)