To compare Wikipedia to Columbia Encyclopedia...
has the full text of Columbia.
There are pages for alphabetic browsing.
http://www.encyclopedia.com/browse/browse-Aa.asp
From these pages, it should be possible to get a list of all their
article titles.
These could be matched up against Wikipedia article titles.
Then we could ask the hypothetical: suppose Wikipedia just snagged the same 55,000 topics as Columbia? How big would the resulting text be?
If the answer is in the ballpark of 6,500,000 words -- i.e. the same size as Columbia - then we have an obvious strategy. If, as I would imagine, the answer is that we're bigger, then we can start digging into how many of our longer articles would have to be edited down in order to hit the same "ballpark".
Note that we don't have an answer from a publisher as to how big we can be. The guy I talked to expressed a desire to be "as big as possible" but I warned him that that's a limitation that's going to come from their end, not ours, because we're already bigger than Britannica, so our issue is how to get *small enough*, not how to produce *enough*.
--Jimbo