On 10/4/05, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 04/10/05, Daniel P. B. Smith <dpbsmith(a)verizon.net> wrote:
But there is a practical limit of about thirty
volumes for a print
publication, isn't there? No, there isn't. The existence proof is any
journal. Journals can and do grow linearly, year after year, into
long rows of bound volumes which libraries, if not homes, manage to
find room for on their shelves. I am sure that some homes have more
than 30 bound-volumes-worth of the National Geographic neatly stacked
up in attics or basements.
Newspapers (not that many places still keep bound copies) are an even
worse case.
Or bibliographies. The British Museum "Catalogue of Printed Books" to
1900 was 95 volumes; to 1905 was another 13-volume supplement. (Four
million books, if you're wondering). The Library of Congress /Catalog/
was 167 volumes for 1899-1942 (covering two million books; it was far
less because it reproduced the actual catalog cards) - and 1942-7 was
another forty. The Bibliotheque Nationale "Catalogue général" ran to
172 volumes as of 1948, and had only got up to 'Sim-' in the alphabet!
National Geographic, newpapers, and bibliographies, all have a greater
breadth of information than Wikipedia, though.
If I put all the information from the Tampa Tribune into Wikipedia, even
ignoring the time-sensitive information, don't you think most of it would be
nominated for deletion? Do we have an information in Wikipedia on [[Tampa
Bay SalsaFest]], [[Ray Perdomo]], [[Marco Santi]], or [[Town 'N Country
Hospital]]? I couldn't find any. Maybe the Tampa Bay Tribune is too local,
but I'm sure the same could be said of the stories in the USA Today.
I'm also not so sure the number of work hours put in by Wikipedians isn't
many many times the number of work hours put in by the staff of the USA
Today. It would be interesting to try to guestimate these figures, I
suppose.