[WikiEN-l] What is happening to the community

[geni]

On 06/03/2008, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> Definitely. See the following for just some of the subjects "at arms'
>  length": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_comparisons
>
>  A selection:
>  *"The Guide Star Catalog II has entries on 998,402,801 distinct
>  astronomical objects searchable online."

Much of which will not have enough info for a substub.

>  *"The British Library is known to hold over 150 million items."

Including rather a lot of fiction. Ever tried to get a copy of
something they hold? Not cheap.

>  *"Genbank, an online database of DNA sequences from over 165,000
>  species , has over 46 million entries"

Not every DNA sequence has had enough written about it for an article.

>  *"31 million CAS registry numbers have been allocated for chemical compounds."

Doesn't mean much. Parallel synthesis techniques mean that organic
compounds can be produce at a very high rate most of which will appear
in a table in one paper.

>  *"the Internet Movie Database claims to have records on 549,131 titles
>  and 2,280,301 names."

Yeah but that includes porn movies which we generally don't find much
in the way of worthwhile sources on.


Lists of named places and bios are reasonable. Comparisons other large
databases are going to tend to be less so.
-- 
geni