I think the only thing limiting amount of articles is our ablity to maintain them. I suppose that would scale though, with the exception of adding information from outside sources which would allow a growth in content without necesarly a growth in the amount of man power needed to maintain the content. If there about subjects which need little maintance, I suppose it won't be too much of a problem.
The Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada handle their 70-volume encyclopedia by just adding supplements and never updating anything, so its actually up to 116 volumes now ( http://www.libroantiguo.org/obr/euiea.htm ). This is not a good tactic. It has become historical in its own right.
The Swedish dictionary is bigger then the OED? A lot of words in the latter are not used anymore. I like looking through it and picking out odd sounding words to impress others with my "English" vocabulary even though whether the words have much to do with the English we all know and love is negotiable. Its handy if to have if you need to read Old English, I suppose - probably ditto for the Swedish dictionary. American ditionary's usually will throw out old words, though our dictionaries are not really old enough to have any words (or at least so much words) that absolutly nobody uses anymore like the OED.
Ian Monroe http://ian.webhop.org
On Sun, 7 Apr 2002, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX wrote:
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. :-)
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik Teknikringen 1e, SE-583 30 Linuxköping, Sweden tel +46-70-7891609 http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/
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Ian wrote:
to 116 volumes now ( http://www.libroantiguo.org/obr/euiea.htm ). This is not a good tactic. It has become historical in its own right.
You're right, of course. But it is still an impressive endeavour. Just like the pyramids: you can admire them without understanding what they are useful for.
The Swedish dictionary is bigger then the OED? A lot of words in the
The Swedish Academy was founded in 1786, modeled from the French Academy. Maybe their most important task today is awarding the Nobel prize for literature. But one of their first goals was to establish a complete dictionary of the Swedish language. However, they had to abandon their first plan, which was too unorganized. The first volume of the *current* project appeared in 1898, and a century later they are just finishing letter S - the 32nd volume. They plan to finish the alphabet by 2020. The entire contents is available online, free of charge, but covered by copyright, http://g3.spraakdata.gu.se/saob/
Of course, this is a pyramid. You cannot lookup "telefon", because they haven't done T yet. The article "automobil" was written in 1903 (http://g3.spraakdata.gu.se/osa/show.phtml?filenr=1/18/4608.html). Still, this is a good documentation of the historic use of written Swedish from 1521 (the reformation) until c. 1899. If you lookup the word Encyklopedi (http://g3.spraakdata.gu.se/osa/show.phtml?filenr=1/62/15725.html), you can see that it was first observed in written Swedish in 1758.
This 32+ volume work is named SAOB. There is also a 1 volume handbook called SAOL, which is currently in its 12th edition, and this is the spelling reference that all Swedish school teachers and newspaper journalists use. Then there are a few other Swedish multivolume dictionaries that are must-haves for any collector or library. But SAOB is the king. There will never again be anything so...eh, great.
suppose - probably ditto for the Swedish dictionary. American ditionary's usually will throw out old words, though our dictionaries are not really
A gardener has to balance between allowing growth and weeding/pruning. With the Internet and Moore's law, we have a much bigger garden.
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