I didn't see mentioned the possibility that the number of topics is finite, and therefore the number of new pages created per day must slow down someday. We live in a world were the main assumption is that everything is infinite, but that's possibly wrong.
That's a reasonable first guess, but it seems very unlikely to be true. Wikipedias in other languages do not all asymptote at the same sizes, print encyclopedias span quite a range of sizes, the superset of specialist encyclopedias would be much larger than even the famous ones like Encyclopedia Britannica, and comparisons of the overlap of the English WP with foreign-language WPs suggests WP could easily be several times larger than it is ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus/Wikipedia_interwi... ); and Wikia keeps expanding on specialist topics (not just fiction-related wikias). Finally, I used to subscribe to the paper New York Times and read or skim every article in every section for a while out of curiosity; I could have easily spent my entire editing career doing nothing but updating WP based on each day's issue - even though you might think that as one of the most prestigious English newspapers, the English WP would have a mortal lock on coverage of stuff which appear in the NYT.
There's always something to write about. Did you mean that all the articles that people are eager to write have already been written?
"The subsequent research has in some respects vindicated my views: some have tried to argue that the declines are due to picking all the low-hanging fruit in articles or in available editors, that lower quality editors merited additional procedures."
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I didn't see mentioned the possibility that the number of topics is finite, and therefore the number of new pages created per day must slow down someday. We live in a world were the main assumption is that everything is infinite, but that's possibly wrong.
That's a reasonable first guess, but it seems very unlikely to be true. Wikipedias in other languages do not all asymptote at the same sizes, print encyclopedias span quite a range of sizes, the superset of specialist encyclopedias would be much larger than even the famous ones like Encyclopedia Britannica, and comparisons of the overlap of the English WP with foreign-language WPs suggests WP could easily be several times larger than it is ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus/Wikipedia_interwi... ); and Wikia keeps expanding on specialist topics (not just fiction-related wikias). Finally, I used to subscribe to the paper New York Times and read or skim every article in every section for a while out of curiosity; I could have easily spent my entire editing career doing nothing but updating WP based on each day's issue - even though you might think that as one of the most prestigious English newspapers, the English WP would have a mortal lock on coverage of stuff which appear in the NYT.
There's always something to write about. Did you mean that all the articles that people are eager to write have already been written?
"The subsequent research has in some respects vindicated my views: some have tried to argue that the declines are due to picking all the low-hanging fruit in articles or in available editors, that lower quality editors merited additional procedures."