Daniel Mayer wrote:
Hm. Is there a machine readable list of all 75,000 of Britannica's articles somewhere? If we had such a list then we could perform this analysis; cross-check all article titles in en.Wikipedia with Britannica articles.
I don't think a direct comparison of titles would work very well. Britannica's articles are what I would call monolithic, while Wikipedia's are modular. For example, Britannica's article on a given country is usually comprehensive abd spans 30+ pages, though there is often a separate article for the country's history. The Wikipedia article on the same country is really an entry point to all the various articles we have on that country; it serves as a quick overview with links to separate, more detailed articles.
Basically, I don't know if the different naming conventions and fudamentally different information organizational methods of the two encyclopedias would allow for a useful comparision of article titles.
Stephen G.