User:EpochFail/When will wikipedia be done

OK. I had a thought. When will Wikipedia be done?

Well, we spend about 12 million labor hours per year editing Wikipedia. We've put in like 150 million by now. Right now, we have 5,893 out of 5,095,532 articles in the Featured class. We have another 29,152 that are *almost* featured.

Methods

For the sake of discussion, I'm going to assume that the number of hours it takes to write for the next quality class grows exponentially. A Stub take time unit of work. A Featured Article takes 32 time units of work. This is probably off. If a stub takes an hour, a featured article probably takes more than 32 hours. Better, we can measure it! But for the time being, I'm going to run with it.

So, if Wikipedia were to be fully completed, it would take 5M articles * 32 work units. But we've already finished some. Based on en:Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Statistics (727396687), I built the following fraction.

(5893 * 32 + 
 1660 * 16 + 
 27492 * 16 + 
 110293 * 8 + 
 236252 * 4 + 
 1253545 * 2 + 
 2923925 * 1 + 
 536472 * 1) / 
(5893 * 32 + 
 27492 * 32 + 
 1660 * 32 + 
 110293 * 32 + 
 236252 * 32 + 
 1253545 * 32 + 
 2923925 * 32 + 
 536472 * 32)

I made a few arbitrary decisions.

1. GA == A @ 16 time units
2. Unassessed = Stub @ 1 time unity

Results

According to this simplified model, we're 5.1% done writing Wikipedia. If we've spent 150m hours so far, that means we have 2.9 billion hours left. At 12m hours per year, we'll finish Wikipedia in 2262.

Conclusion

This is a simple model of Wikipedia. It's really just something I cooked up for fun. There's a lot of fun things that this doesn't account for, but I don't want spend a bunch of time writing all of those limitations up. So here's a grain of salt.

Salt grain. An image of a grain of table salt taken using a scanning electron microscope.