Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
It is frequently said that Wikipedia is not paper.
Specifically,
"Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia. This means that there is no
practical limit to number of topics we can cover other than
verifiability and the other points presented on this page."
But paper is not paper, either. That is, paper encyclopedias are NOT
physically limited in size. Some encylopedias (Columbia) have one
volume. Some have more. The first edition of the Encyclopedia
Britannica had three volumes; the Eleventh Edition had 29. The
current Britannica 3 has 32 volumes.
The 12th edition from 1922 also had 32 volumes.
(By the way, the Britannica states, rather
hyperbolically, that those
32 volumes offer "a boundless range of information.")
And we run out of bounds from the boundless
Is the print Britannica limited to 32 volumes by some
kind of
physical law? Certainly not. In fact, tens of thousands of households
that purchase print encyclopedias wisely or foolish subscribe to
yearbook programs, often for many years, until they get tired of
gluing little cross-reference stickers into their volumes. So the
number of books on the shelf actually grows.
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.
So what DOES set the limit to what an encyclopedia can include? It is
not any physical characteristic, whether measured in quarto leaves or
in bytes.
IIRC there was a time when the Britannica was sold door-to-door in
communities where reading was not a routine practice. One had to impress
the neighbours. So along with the books you would receive a lovely
wooden bookcase to contain them. The set of books had to fit in the
bookcase, with a little room left over for the next few yearbooks that
could be part of the subsciption.