Boris Lohnzweiger wrote:
But what is an encyclopia supposed to be? Me, I think any encyclopedia
- printed or online - should serve as a _comprehensive_and_reliable_
source of information. Otherwhise it's useless. Imagine you go about looking up something in a printed encyclopedia only to find out it lacks some article it definetly ought to contain. I'd probably throw that book into the nearest trash can. Now how many articles does an encyclopedia need to be useful for the reader? I suppose the world's most renowned encyclopedias all contain 100,000+ articles. More compact versions do exist, but I seriously doubt that any book with less than 10,000 articles could ever provide a useful amount of information from all fields of knowledge.
To this end, you might like to look at:
[[:meta:List of articles all languages should have]] [[:simple:List of articles all languages should have]]
These are lists of a thousand or so articles that someone wanting to set up a new Wikipedia can use as a start to fill out their encyclopedia.
- d.