On 5/23/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
How many articles _should_ Wikipedia have?
Considering topics worthy of articles are being created all the time, the number of articles we should have is unlimited. As for how many articles we should have at this exact moment... probably in the billions. Certainly more than 20 million - we could probably reach that just on places.
This page, hosted by the Smithsonian, says the number of insect species alone is estimated anywhere from 2 to 30 million. [http://www.si.edu/Encyclopedia_SI/nmnh/buginfo/bugnos.htm]
The Encyclopedia of Life hopes to list "all 1.8 million known plant and animal species". [http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/58.html]
So that would get us started way beyond the ~2 million we have now.
Erica