What do you think? Here is an interesting study that addresses the possibilities. It is titled, The Collaborative Organization of Knowledge, by Diomidis Spinellis and Panagiotis Louridas and 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 at the box office.

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 reminds me of the print I have from a section of a map of Paris done in the 1720s that included every building from an aerial view.  The complete map fills a whole wall and required a somewhat unique perspective for its time.

This is not Second Life that is being created but First Life. Will we all end up in Wikipedia? Are you there already? Who put you there? I did find 503 results for my name but the first 50 related to those who share my name, just like many of my Google Alerts. I stopped looking after that. So there is room for growth.