The website http://www.xrefer.org/ has the full text of several desktop reference books, including (for example) the Oxford Paperback Encyclopedia, with 17,696 entries (they claim 20,000 on the site, but there are only 17,696 that I can find). These are all fairly short, in the manner of a desktop encyclopedia, and many of them are what we would disparage as mere "stubs".
But presumably, these entries were selected by some central conscious process, as opposed to the random meandering wiki process, and so they should have fewer odd gaps in their entries than we do. (And fewer articles on obscure topics that someone here happens to care about, of course!)
My breadth test is to select 10 random entries from their work and check to see if there is a corresponding entry in ours.
A raw number test would make us look better for having lots of stubs; I'm not sure we want to encourage stubs, though. It's a controversial issue, anyhow. So I'm looking at the quality of what we do have rather than trying a simple count.
The urls for their articles are like this: http://www.xrefer.com/entry/218376
---- 218376 Klein, Melanie They have: 2 sentence stub article We have: no article, she is list in 2 articles on psychology ---- 211517 Brandt, Willy (born Karl Herbert Frahm) (1913-1992) They have: 5 sentence article on this Nobel Peace Prize winner We have: 5 paragraph short article.
In this case, our article is much better. The Oxford Paperback Encyclopedia article does not even reveal that Brandt was Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. ---- 209321 Akali (Punjabi, worshipper of the Timeless One) They have: 5 sentence article We have: nothing ---- 217782 Jagannath Temple They have: 2 sentence article We have: nothing ---- 215496 forester moth They have: essentially a redirect to 'burnet moth', a 4 sentence article We have: a link [[lepidoptera]] to [[zygaenidae]], which is the scientific name for these ---- 213209 community care They have: 4 sentence article, mostly juxtaposing community care with institutional care We have: basically nothing, a mention of 'community care centers' in [[involuntary commitment]] ---- 221760 Petrarch (born Francesco Petrarca) (1304 - 1374) Italian poet. They have: 3 sentence short article We have: 2 sentence stub. Their article is better than ours. ---- 219474 Malcolm (Four kings of Scotland) They have: Short article on Malcolm I - Malcolm IV We have: Short articles on each of Malcolm I and Malcolm III, no mention of II and IV, who it seems were less important. Our articles are better than their single article. ---- 214901 E number They have: "See 'food additive'" We have: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_number - an explanation of what an E number is, along with a list of them. Our article is a LOT better here. ---- 212615 Prince Charles They have: 4 sentence short article We have: 4 paragraph short article, much better than theirs
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Well, I said that I wouldn't keep numerical score, but here it is anyway: They win 7, we win 3, in terms of who has a better article.
In terms of sheer breadth, we cover 5 of 10 topics.
--Jimbo