Stefan Mileschin

A historical researcher said that Wikipedia is about as good as it is going to get.

Writing in the Journal of Military History, which we get for the spot the cannon ball competition, Richard Jensen wrote that Wikipedia may be as complete as it's ever going to be.

Jensen describes how the Wikipedia entry for the War of 1812 shows how complete the online encyclopedia is.

The post, which explains how the British came back after the Revolutionary War, burnt the White House and nearly took the country back, has more or less stopped being edited.

In the early days of that war's Wikipedia entry, it was being edited dozens of times a day by a dedicated group of history buffs, Jensen wrote.

This has happened to thousands of articles as the major events, people, and concepts in history are covered more or less comprehensively.

Jensen pointed out that there are a finite number of things about which one can write about one subject.

He said that once an encyclopedia reaches 100,000 articles, the pool of good material shrinks. By the time one million articles are written, it must tax ingenuity to think of something new. Wikipedia passed the four million article mark in summer 2012, he said.

There is still a lot of work to be done in Wikipedia, such as the localisation of articles to other languages, he suggested.

http://news.techeye.net/internet/wik...cally-finished