From: Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net
The 12th edition from 1922 also had 32 volumes.
I was afraid someone was going to mention that.
Yes, but the three additional volumes, which bring the Encyclopaedia up to date with articles on the World War and the latest developments in Aeronautics (with a nice diagram of an Immelmann turn), and developments in architecture such as the Woolworth Building in New York, are captioned "New Volumes" on the spine, have their own separate index, and are not integrated into the main text at all. There isn't even a page of cross-reference stickers to glue into the main volumes (actually I don't know whether Britannica had those; World Book certainly did, though).
So IMHO these are not really part of the encyclopedia proper. They are more like a three-volume Britannica Book of the Year.
I also _think_ that the Britannica 3 has considerably thicker volumes and smaller print than the Eleventh Edition had. Neil Harris says it has about 44 million words. The Eleventh edition--someone probably has an actual word count--has 29 volumes of about 1000 pages each, with about two columns of fifty lines of ten words per line = 30,000,000 words, so the Britannica has grown more than the count of volumes would suggest.
-- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith@verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
I heard one that the total sum of all human knowledge has doubled very second year for the past few decades. As in: The scientists doing research between 2003 - 2005 learned more things than everything they knew in the beginning of 2003. So if we want to keep Wikipedia's coverage as broad and deep as it is today, the number of articles have to double every other year.
-- mvh Björn
On Wed, 2005-10-05 at 14:10 +0200, BJörn Lindqvist wrote:
I heard one that the total sum of all human knowledge has doubled very second year for the past few decades. As in: The scientists doing research between 2003 - 2005 learned more things than everything they knew in the beginning of 2003. So if we want to keep Wikipedia's coverage as broad and deep as it is today, the number of articles have to double every other year.
{{unverified}} - reference please. Sounds implausible to me. And research isnt about "things" in general.
The steady state growth once we have caught up on the backlog of stuff that we know now should be tehre is an interesting question. Also whether people will become less interested in contributing as more is filled in.
On 05/10/05, BJörn Lindqvist bjourne@gmail.com wrote:
I heard one that the total sum of all human knowledge has doubled very second year for the past few decades. As in: The scientists doing research between 2003 - 2005 learned more things than everything they knew in the beginning of 2003. So if we want to keep Wikipedia's coverage as broad and deep as it is today, the number of articles have to double every other year.
Doubling every other year is a 40% year-on-year increase. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm en.wiki seems to have been increasing article count at circa 6% per month for much of the year, assuming it hasn't significantly changed recently. 6% per month constant growth is - roughly - 100% year-on-year increase. By wordcount, it was going up... hmm, let's call it 7.5% and be conservative. That's roughly a 140% increase year-on-year.
At current rates, then, we're growing much faster than scientific knowledge is! That said, I have my doubts over the figure - it sounds far too hard to quantify, and a little too neat to be true. Maybe it's quantifying raw data generation? That I could well believe. (Did I ever point this list to the video of Lessig's talk at Fermilab? I must dig up my notes on it)
Mind you, it's a pretty good metric - doubling over two years is definitely the kind of thing we'd want a good healthy project to be doing. If you want to use this metric in future, a handy rule of thumb is that any wiki which grows at *3% or more* a month, in your favourite way of counting "size", will a little more than double over two years. Feel free to use this to encourage people...
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk