Jimmy Wales wrote:
I would never have thought that someone would interpret the 100,000 figure as the _maximum_, as part of a critique of us that we are nearly 1/3 of the way "done" and yet don't cover X, Y, and Z.
One thing that Britannica (or any printed encyclopedia) "has" is a limitation in space. This forces them to set a maximum (above 66,000 articles, the printed work might be so expensive to print that its market starts to diminish), and within this maximum they must prioritize what to write about. Wikipedia has totally different cost structure (neither print costs, nor author costs), so there is no need to set a maximum. Even if the article count is half or double that of some well-known printed encyclopedia, the openness is worth more, and should be the envy of any encyclopedia publisher.
As a non-native speaker of English and a newcomer to English-language culture, it strikes me that the most hailed reference works of this gigantic language group, the Oxford English Dictionary and the Encyclopedia Britannica, seem rather small. The Dictionary of the Swedish Academy (SAOB) is bigger than the OED and the Swedish National Encyclopedia (NE) is about the size of the Britannica, based on a language community of less than 10 million. We envy the Meyers and Brockhaus Encyclopedias of the ten times bigger German-speaking crowd, and when I learned about the Spanish "Enciclopedia Universal Illustrada" (70 volumes) I felt like I came from a little country village to a big city for the first time. It is clear, however, that the Swedish projects would never be completed on a true commercial basis, but needed (and still need) substantial governmental sponsoring.
The first major Swedish encyclopedia was "Nordisk familjebok" published in 18 volumes (1876-1894). On 14,000 pages with an average of 7 articles per page, this is an estimated 100,000 articles. This Easter I just finished scanning the remaining 5 volumes, so it is now online, free for all, on http://www.lysator.liu.se/runeberg/nf/ in facsimile, with a short English preface. Have a look!
The work is free from copyright, so you can use its illustrations. I already used one for http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Gatling_gun
So, despite the smallness of the Swedish Wikipedia, there are already 100,000 Swedish articles online, just a century old, and hard to edit. :-)