Having done a lot of data mining and analysis of Wikipedia (scanning its entire corpus several times, machine learning new representations, studying traffic and

Having done a lot of data mining and analysis of Wikipedia (scanning its entire corpus several times, machine learning new representations, studying traffic and article growth stats, studying its ontological structure) I would like to make two suggestions: (1) In its current structure, Wikipedia is “almost complete”. For the way that articles are written, embellished with media, and organized there doesn’t appear to be much room for change to most of them. This should be concerning, because in reality Wikipedia is always only the tip of the iceberg for everything. (2) In order to inspire a new growth of editing and contributions to Wikipedia, which can expand the corpus by another order of magnitude, new systems for organizing and communicating knowledge need to be developed that can allow orders of magnitude more information to be elegantly incorporated into existing articles. If anyone is interested in pursuing this, I don’t suggest waiting for the bureaucracies and crowds to develop it (although would obviously be thrilled if they did); what’s in your power now is to fork the corpus yourself, and start a new open source initiative on its back. This is the classic case of how hard it is for big organizations to adapt in big ways (almost impossible), versus a small startup enterprise.