[WikiEN-l] Hypothetical print version, and using Google to rank articles

[David Gerard]

Neil Harris wrote:

>Just for comparison, the current edition of the EB has about 44M words
>in 32 volumes. As of July 13, the English-language Wikipedia contained
>649,000 articles, and a total of roughly 224M words.
>Wikipedia currently has over 750,000 articles, so assuming that article
>size has not reduced, it probably has around 258M words. This is almost
>six times the size of the EB, and would take at least 187 volumes of
>EB-equivalent size.
>In my opinion, an article ranking system would be an ideal way to start
>collecting data for trying to place articles in rank order for inclusion
>in a fixed amount of space.


Indeed!

    http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/En_validation_topics
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:David_Gerard/1.0


>One interesting possibility is, in addition to user rankings, using the
>number of times the article's title is mentioned on the web -- the
>Google test -- as an extra input to any hypothetical ranking system.


Now *that*'s a new and potentially useful idea.


- d.