2009/8/19 Emily Monroe bluecaliocean@me.com:
Oh, now THAT'S funny.
I actually looked up Wikipedia's word count. The last estimate is 1.6 billion words.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes
"Three million articles" is obviously big. But no-one has a feel for how big that is. OVER A BILLION WORDS is a way scarier pile of information. Can you wrap your head around A BILLION WORDS?
For comparison, Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past"/"In Search of Lost Time" is 9 million words in several huge volumes; Hubbard's "Mission Earth" is 1.2 million words; Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" is 470,000 words.
The SOS Children Wikipedia Selection for Schools seems very cut-down, being only several thousand long articles from Wikipedia on a DVD ... so about half the size of the full printed Britannica, then.
- d.