[belorn]

How many 50-person companies do you think have existed, globally, since 2001?

Lets just make some very rough estimates. Sweden with a population of 10 million creates an average of 36 500 new companies per year. Let say than 5% reach at some point 50 employees, which would result in 180 Wikipedia articles per million population per year. There is 7.4 billion people in the world, so that is 180 * 1000 * 7.4 * 16, which would be a bit over 21 million Wikipedia articles that only covers new 50-person and bigger companies (not including companies created before 2001).

The people who accused you of "single purpose account" were of course in the fault since they should have assumed good-faith, but I can't generally disagree with the notion that a 50-person startup might need more than employees to be notable enough for a encyclopedia.

[sien]

The assumption that the world creates 50 person companies at the same rate as Sweden is not likely.

Company listings are actually often really useful on wikipedia, there can be some outside info that is far better than what the company itself has and if there are suspect things about the company wikipedia can link to them as well.

Wikipedia at one point deleted the article on Atlasssian because 'it wasn't notable'.

Unlike so many minor characters in Star Wars...

[belorn]

I said "very rough estimates" since indeed the world average is unlikely to be exactly the same as Sweden. But even if we reduce the global rate to 10% of Sweden (fair?), it is still 2 million articles and would cover half the current size of english Wikipedia.

Usefulness of non-notible articles is often discussed in Wikipedia. One side generally argue that any article that is useful should be included. The idea that notability is the criteria and not usefulness is an interesting discussion, and part of the deletionism versus inclusionism controversy.

[oh_sigh]

Considering approximately 2 billion people in the world are self sustaining farmers, even 10% of Swedens rate is an over-estimate.

[hueving]

>enough for a encyclopedia.

I hate this argument. Wikipedia is not some storage bound book shipped out to people. There should be no limit on articles as long as the content is verifiable by contributors.

You might say, "but the disambiguation page will get big." well, that's a technical problem that can be fixed. I can search for something on Google and find it easily even though it contains far more than Wikipedia.

[flomo]

And I hate that argument too. There are long-term costs for maintaining any page on wikipedia, because there's always people out there looking to insert troll content or provide biased information for a specifically-targeted search term.

I'd estimate the typical page on Wikipedia has 0-1 people actively looking after it. And some of these articles are extremely popular (but noncontroversial) people/places/things. Wikipedia is full of articles which are "done" but still suck.

So you cannot look at a volunteer project and determine the storage costs are negligible, no problem, because that's very obviously not the main challenge.

[Sacho]

> There are long-term costs for maintaining any page on wikipedia, because there's always people out there looking to insert troll content or provide biased information for a specifically-targeted search term.

But these costs do not scale on a per-page basis; rather, they scale based on the number of trolls. I don't think the number of pages meaningfully changes the amount of effort "trolls" put into "trolling"; meanwhile, automated tools like watchlists allow you to keep an eye on an unlimited number of pages.

It should be much easier to automate anti-"trolling" tools on fringe pages which get very few edits - e.g. automatically adding newly-created or rarely-edited pages to a watchlist.

Finally, it doesn't look like wikipedia has a great editor retention policy if the problem was really combating trolls; There seems to have been an assumption of bad faith on the count of GP - if he is really a "PR shill", then no skin off their back - if they're paid to do it, they'll keep trying, becoming a "troll". However, if he was to be a legitimate editor, blaming them from starting in their own topic of interest(even if it was self-promotion) doesn't seem like a good way to retain them as a long-term editor.

[flomo]

> they scale based on the number of trolls

Low-level trolling has almost zero cost on wikipedia, you don't even need an account. Especially for articles that are largely politically uncontroversial and "done". So they probably catch most of the vandals, and use their process to stop maybe the top 20% of political kooks. But when some random adds dubious information to a long-tail article, it can hang around for years.

[hueving]

Moderators are voting to remove pages that have validated data. That's idiotic because it's more work than leaving the article be in a locked state.

I would rather have a bunch of articles that are locked rather than deleted by some moderator that thinks they are defending the glory of worthy human knowledge.

[ErrantX]

There are no moderators, you could comment too.

[mattmcknight]

In Sweden, the current proportion of companies greater than 50 people is closer to 0.5%. Since many companies close before reaching this size, the rate attaining that size is much lower by another factor of 10. So, your numbers exaggerate the amount by at least 100x on this basis, not to mention the huge portion of the world population which is not living in advanced economies with high rates of corporate formation.

[yuhong]

It would be fun to estimate storage space for the articles.