I have been facinated by Wikipedia since it’s inception. Currently, the English version has over 1.5M entries.
I was wondering: when the sum total of human knowledge is documented, how many entries would Wikipedia have? Every song written, every famous person that has lived, every city town and village in the world, every organism, every chemical compound etc.
I do understand that current events result in additional entries to the site and maybe we can disregard that for the purpose of this question (since the number of articles would therefore be more).
Are you asking this with the expectation of a serious reply? You want someone to total the number of topics that have existed since the begining of time? Can I have some of what you are smoking, because apparently the world you live in is awfully nice.
And the serious answer is… the question is fundamentally flawed. There will never be a ‘completed’ version of Wikipedia, because people will continue adding to it as new people, places, things, philosophies, and events become important. So the only way to answer the question needs to include a projected date when society collapses to the point that no one is contributing to Wikipedia anymore… at which point, no one will be reading it either, and the number will be irrelevant.
Wikipedia would have an infinite amount of articles. There will always be more news and significant people born, new technology to keep up with, etc. As long as Wikipedia exists (as we know it), it will never be finished/completed.
There’s a significant amount of info on WP that is simply random pop-culture stuff. When you consider that many current/past TV shows have separate pages for each episode (episode guides), many CD’s have separate pages, etc., those alone will continue to grow indefinitely.
I agree with the above posters, and I don’t think the quoted sentence is really do-able. “Current Events” could be just about anything that happens. I was just looking at the Nintendo Wii on Wikipedia. Obviously there’s an entry for that. There’s also one for the controller. And the nunchuk. And the internet service. Eventually, there will be a History of the Wii. Each game that will come out will have its own entry, as will each major character of each game. And minor characters will be listed in an entry for each game. Every new engine or technology that comes out will get its own entry. Every major developer will have its own entry, every third-party add-on, every documented Wii-related injury, every modification to the hardware, etc etc.
Every topic on Wikipedia could conceivably give birth to an infinite number of topics, depending on how obsessive the internet is about it. Trying to estimate a final total is about as impossible as impossible gets.
And that’s exactly why I love Wikipedia. Pretty much everyting I could ever want to know about anything is right there, free for the asking. Sometimes I even write down little lists of all the topics and subjects I want to look up learn about next time I log on.
On the one hand you’d think eventually it’d reach some kind of plateau. OTOH, there’s wiki pages for numbers and as more and more numbers become important for one reason or another there’s no reason why we can’t have an infinite number of pages just for numbers.
No, here’s what I mean. Right now there are 32,477,779 pages. Wiki should have a page for the number 32,477,779, which would create another page… (it was a joke).