Wikipedia is the largest free global encyclopedia, and it’s increasing in size all the time. It has now passed the 3-million-articles milestone, a truly impressive figure given the nature of the project. But where does it go from here – is growth now going to stall, and is Wikipedia set to stagnate?

Wikipedia was launched on Jan. 15, 2001 and has spent the last eight years building an online encyclopedia intended as a free repository of knowledge available to all. Not only can anyone and everyone access the information contained within Wikipedia, but anyone and everyone can also add to the knowledge base by becoming a contributor or editor.

It took almost five years for Wikipedia to rack up its first 1 million articles. But then only another 17 months for the site to hit the 2 million articles milestone. At 4.04am on August 17, Wikipedia reached 3 million articles with an entry on Beate Eriksen, an actress and film director who is best known for her role as Ingrid Iversen in a Norwegian soap opera titled Hotel Caesar.

As well as those three million articles, Wikipedia boasts 17 million pages and 10 million registered users. The latter of which have made 326 million edits to the site. Those three million articles are just the English-language ones, with there being another 10 million articles in the other 271 languages used on the site.

However, it’s taken almost two years for the site to grow from two million articles to three million, which suggests growth is slowing considerably. And that’s borne out by the fact that in July 2007 there was an average of 2,200 new articles created whereas there is now an average of 1,300 created each day. That’s still mightily impressive but just not as impressive as it formerly was.

Part of the reason for this slowdown is the group of hardcore editors and administrators who seem to be keeping a much tighter rein on what appears on Wikipedia. According to The Guardian, although the number of contributors has risen to almost 500,000, the number of active editors has stayed consistent for years.

There’s a battle of wills going on at Wikipedia to determine if it’s to stay as an open house regime or to evolve into a more controlled environment where each edit is approved. If those in favor of the latter win out then getting to four million articles could take a while.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 2:12 am under Internet, Opinion, Technology.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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