Neil Harris wrote:

Just for comparison, the current edition of the EB has about 44M words in 32 volumes. As of July 13, the English-language Wikipedia contained 649,000 articles, and a total of roughly 224M words. Wikipedia currently has over 750,000 articles, so assuming that article size has not reduced, it probably has around 258M words. This is almost six times the size of the EB, and would take at least 187 volumes of EB-equivalent size. In my opinion, an article ranking system would be an ideal way to start collecting data for trying to place articles in rank order for inclusion in a fixed amount of space.

Indeed!

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/En_validation_topics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:David_Gerard/1.0

One interesting possibility is, in addition to user rankings, using the number of times the article's title is mentioned on the web -- the Google test -- as an extra input to any hypothetical ranking system.

Now *that*'s a new and potentially useful idea.

- d.