dpbsmith@verizon.net wrote:
Incidentally, article size is one area in which "Wikipedia is not paper" serves us poorly. In the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the article on the Bible is approximately one megabyte in size. That decision was presumably made on the basis of style, organization, and readability. You can riffle through twenty pages a second or more and still glimpse running heads. And the articles in the old Britannica are so well-written that you can sit down with them and read them from beginning to end.
I think Britannica goes for a different style than we do, largely because it *is* paper. In a paper encyclopedia, cross-references are much more of a hassle, and the reader can't flip between articles and volumes in the click of a mouse. Thus, articles tend to be longer and fewer. With Wikipedia, there's no trouble breaking up a major topic like, say [[United States]], into an overview article with separate articles on [[History of the United States]], [[Economy of the United States]], and so on, because it doesn't place much of a burden on our users to click through if they want the long articles. Even the way we format it---"Main article: [[History of the United States]]"---really only makes sense in a hyperlinked encyclopedia.
It does bring up the interesting point that perhaps there should be a little more editing in making a paper version besides just validating articles. For example, it might make sense to collate these all into one article for print publication.
-Mark