Here is an interesting study that I could not resist cross posting from Fast Forward, The Collaborative Organization of Knowledge, by Diomidis Spinellis and Panagiotis Louridas that appeared in the August 2008 issue of the Association for Computing Machinery magazine Communications of the ACM. Dimomidis summarizes it on his blog, Wikipedia Faces no Limits to Grow. Just like Mamma Mia. Diomidis wrote that they “studied the entire Wikipedia corpus, 485 Gbytes of data, adding up to 1.9 million pages and 28.2 million revisions” (at the time they looked).
He summarized the results. “showed that the ratio of undefined to defined concepts in Wikipedia has been stable over time. Furthermore, we found that articles are added to Wikipedia in a collaborative fashion: Wikipedians often add a new article when they encounter a missing entry. Finally, we established that Wikipedia grows in a manner similar to that witnessed in a number of different areas, by having new articles linked to the most popular existing articles. This pattern of growth, called preferential attachment, has been used to explain the number of species per genus, the internet, the world-wide-web, scientific citations, collaboration networks between people, and others. It is the first time preferential attachment has been studied live at a structure of this size.”
Being a fan of Jorge Luis Borges, I especially liked their reference to his 1946 short story "On Exactitude in Science". “The wise men of the empire undertake to create a complete map of the it; upon finishing, they realise the map was so big it coincided with the empire itself.” This is not Second Life but First Life. Will we all end up in Wikipedia? Tomorrow I tackle Twitter on this issue.
BTW I discovered that someone using my name was an Australian rugby league footballer in the 1920. Google Alerts is always telling about things I did not know I did such as involvement in Hollywood and composing music.
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