[Wikipedia-l] Number of articles

[Jimmy Wales]

On the homepage, we claim to seek to write 100,000 articles.  We have
nearly 30,000.  As '24' pointed out the other day, with 30,000
articles we don't have one on the Amazon Rain Forest.  I also just
noticed that we don't have one on Real Estate Investment Trusts.  And
we don't have one on 'Corgi', which is a breed of dog, nor do we have
articles on many other dog breeds.

The way we arrived at that 100,000 number was extremely unscientific.
Britannica claims to have 66,000 articles.  And we wanted to have
more.  :-)

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.

I wonder how many articles we really should expect to have.  Obviously,
we'll never be "done".  But the largest dictionaries of English list
around 500,000 words.

--Jimbo