Snowspinner wrote:
Actually his point wasn't that we should produce 26,000 words. It was rather that by contrast to the Britannica article of that length, ours runs to a mere 2000. This is surprisingly short, given the subject. If we can manage 750 words on Squeaky Fromme, why so few on Encyclopedia?
Does Britannica also have separate articles on Encyclopedia Britannica, Brokhaus Encyclopedia, Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Judaica, Etymologiae, Bibliotheke, Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, Encyclopedie, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Lexicon technicum, or, for that matter, Wikipedia?
I dug out a copy of Britannica to look at their article, and that's a big part of the word difference: While we give a high-level overview of the history of the encyclopedia, and break out individual detailed histories into their own articles, Britannica gives a long narrative exposition on the history of the encyclopedia, not entirely unlike what you would get if you merged all those articles back into the main one. That certainly accounts for the history portion of the Britannica article, anyway, which is a pretty good proportion of the wordcount.
-Mark