Out of curiosity, how many pages would it take to package the English Wikipedia?
----- Original Message ---- From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2008 10:03:12 AM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Bertelsmann publishes "Wikipedia Encyclopedia in One Volume"
On 23/04/2008, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned yet in this thread is that by taking only the introductions (which is indeed necessary to get anything close to 50,000 articles into 1000 pages), Bertelsmann in my feeling is removing most of the usefulness from Wikipedia. There will be articles where that's okay, but there will plenty of articles which are excellent in the current form, but become worse-than-trivial if reduced to one-paragraph stubs.
A well-formed English Wikipedia article - and evidently a German Wikipedia one too - should have a lead summary section that constitutes an informative short article in itself, and be written as an inverted pyramid. The first sentence should be informative and standalone, the first paragraph should be informative and standalone, the intro as a unit should be informative and standalone. See [[:en:WP:LEAD]].
So it's not as good as having the whole thing right there, but it supplies more information than none for someone who wants the ten-second summary. A book of those could be quite useful.
And it comes with a free website you can go to for expanded versions once you know you want one ;-)
- d.
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2008/4/26 Geoffrey Plourde geo.plrd@yahoo.com:
Out of curiosity, how many pages would it take to package the English Wikipedia?
In its entirety?
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Size_of_English_Wikipedia_in_August_2007.... :
"Using volumes 25cm high and 5cm thick (some 400 pages), each page having two columns, each columns having 80 rows, and each row having 50 characters, ≈ 6MB per volume. As English Wikipedia has around 7.5GB of text (August 2007, length of wikitext counted by myself) ≈ 1250 volumes. Note that this is a conservative estimate, as it doesn't include images, tables etc. which take up more surface than the text which describes them."
Using pages with dimensions described here; 400 pages x 1250 volumes = 500 000 pages of text in August 2007.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes uses another method to calculate size in volumes, using a live measure of size, and arrives at "equivalen[ce] to 766 volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica". 500 x 766 = 383 000 Britannica-sized leaves. Again, this seems to ignore images, tables, &c.
2008/4/26 Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com:
2008/4/26 Geoffrey Plourde geo.plrd@yahoo.com:
Out of curiosity, how many pages would it take to package the English Wikipedia?
In its entirety?
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Size_of_English_Wikipedia_in_August_2007.... :
"Using volumes 25cm high and 5cm thick (some 400 pages), each page having two columns, each columns having 80 rows, and each row having 50 characters, ≈ 6MB per volume. As English Wikipedia has around 7.5GB of text (August 2007, length of wikitext counted by myself) ≈ 1250 volumes. Note that this is a conservative estimate, as it doesn't include images, tables etc. which take up more surface than the text which describes them."
Using pages with dimensions described here; 400 pages x 1250 volumes = 500 000 pages of text in August 2007.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes uses another method to calculate size in volumes, using a live measure of size, and arrives at "equivalen[ce] to 766 volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica". 500 x 766 = 383 000 Britannica-sized leaves. Again, this seems to ignore images, tables, &c.
By strange coincidence, when I sent this message, my e-mail inbox contained exactly 766 unread conversations.
However, the thing to keep in mind is that this is most certainly not *all* of the German Wikipedia... it is just a part of it with selected articles, much like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:0.5.
On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 3:14 AM, Geoffrey Plourde geo.plrd@yahoo.com wrote:
Out of curiosity, how many pages would it take to package the English Wikipedia?
----- Original Message ---- From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2008 10:03:12 AM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Bertelsmann publishes "Wikipedia Encyclopedia in One Volume"
On 23/04/2008, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned yet in this thread is that by taking only the introductions (which is indeed necessary to get anything close to 50,000 articles into 1000 pages), Bertelsmann in my feeling is removing most of the usefulness from Wikipedia. There will be articles where that's okay, but there will plenty of articles which are excellent in the current form, but become worse-than-trivial if reduced to one-paragraph stubs.
A well-formed English Wikipedia article - and evidently a German Wikipedia one too - should have a lead summary section that constitutes an informative short article in itself, and be written as an inverted pyramid. The first sentence should be informative and standalone, the first paragraph should be informative and standalone, the intro as a unit should be informative and standalone. See [[:en:WP:LEAD]].
So it's not as good as having the whole thing right there, but it supplies more information than none for someone who wants the ten-second summary. A book of those could be quite useful.
And it comes with a free website you can go to for expanded versions once you know you want one ;-)
- d.
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