Jimmy Wales wrote:
I would never have thought that someone would
interpret the 100,000
figure as the _maximum_, as part of a critique of us that we are
nearly 1/3 of the way "done" and yet don't cover X, Y, and Z.
One thing that Britannica (or any printed encyclopedia) "has" is a
limitation in space. This forces them to set a maximum (above 66,000
articles, the printed work might be so expensive to print that its
market starts to diminish), and within this maximum they must
prioritize what to write about. Wikipedia has totally different cost
structure (neither print costs, nor author costs), so there is no need
to set a maximum. Even if the article count is half or double that of
some well-known printed encyclopedia, the openness is worth more, and
should be the envy of any encyclopedia publisher.
As a non-native speaker of English and a newcomer to English-language
culture, it strikes me that the most hailed reference works of this
gigantic language group, the Oxford English Dictionary and the
Encyclopedia Britannica, seem rather small. The Dictionary of the
Swedish Academy (SAOB) is bigger than the OED and the Swedish National
Encyclopedia (NE) is about the size of the Britannica, based on a
language community of less than 10 million. We envy the Meyers
and Brockhaus Encyclopedias of the ten times bigger German-speaking
crowd, and when I learned about the Spanish "Enciclopedia Universal
Illustrada" (70 volumes) I felt like I came from a little country
village to a big city for the first time. It is clear, however, that
the Swedish projects would never be completed on a true commercial
basis, but needed (and still need) substantial governmental
sponsoring.
The first major Swedish encyclopedia was "Nordisk familjebok"
published in 18 volumes (1876-1894). On 14,000 pages with an average
of 7 articles per page, this is an estimated 100,000 articles. This
Easter I just finished scanning the remaining 5 volumes, so it is now
online, free for all, on
http://www.lysator.liu.se/runeberg/nf/
in facsimile, with a short English preface. Have a look!
The work is free from copyright, so you can use its illustrations.
I already used one for
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Gatling_gun
So, despite the smallness of the Swedish Wikipedia, there are already
100,000 Swedish articles online, just a century old, and hard to edit.
:-)
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik
Teknikringen 1e, SE-583 30 Linuxköping, Sweden
tel +46-70-7891609
http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/