Wiki Is Too Big To Edit

Anyone else get this feeling? WikiAtThirtyThousand pages, more, now. Who knows how much duplication there is.

Here are some amusing numbers:

I just ran a word count on all of the pages linked from RandomPages right now. There were 9138 words across 18 pages. Assuming those 18 pages are representative of the whole wiki, we say that the average page has 508 words.
FindPage says there are (as of 20070509) currently 32421 pages.
That means there are about 15 million words in the wiki.
The average reader reads 100 words per minute on a computer screen. (this is not counting comprehension time).
That means it would take 2579 hours to ReadTheWholeWiki.
If reading wiki was your full time job, it would take you 1.2 years to read the wiki. After that year, it would be time to start over, since there would be thousands of new and/or modified pages.

There may be another page on wiki that already has this exact content. (See also: TheLibraryOfBabel)

Has any thought been put into having some AI program digest the content here, and point out similar pages or parts of pages?
Does it even matter if there is duplication?

WikiPedia is larger, yet generally I find its quality is better than what I expected. So I think it is not a problem for the total value of the community to exceed an individual's browsing speed.

I see your point, but I think WikiPedia is considerably different from Wiki. The subject areas are quite different - WikiPedia has a very broad but shallow focus, and Wiki has a very narrow but deep focus. In addition to that, Wiki encourages authors to contribute their personal opinions, but WikiPedia expects that only verifiable facts be submitted. Verifiable facts and documentation tend to have well established names, which surely leads to less duplication. New opinions and discussion are highly personal and there are just as many possible names for a page as there are authors on Wiki. -- MichaelSparks

Try this to break the task down (Reading and Editing the Wiki):

Take the List of pages from RandomPages, Correct any errors you see in punctuation, spelling and grammar. Correct (if possible) any BrokenLinks? by entering the new Link pointing to a new location, or a page similar. Add and/or update items to provide up-to-date references.

Several version of RandomPages are provided each day, with the current one overwriting the old one. In this way of the perhaps 60 pages each day, for which corrections or changes might be needed to 25 percent, or about 15 pages, in a year, over 5000 pages will have been edited. That is approximately one sixth of the pages in wiki. In this way, one, two, or many persons will have edited the entire wiki in six or seven years. (No body said it was a small task). Other schemes might accomplish the task in as few as one or two years.

It isn't so much that WikiIsTooBigToEdit, as it is that Wiki can be edited by a relatively small number of persons, entirely, in an acceptable length of time.

I have started to do my part. -- DonaldNoyes 20060509

RefactorLowHangingFruit