[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia reaches 3 millionth article

[Carcharoth]

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 8:08 AM, Ray Saintonge<saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Carcharoth wrote:

<snip>

>> Goodness. Yes. That is a large number of volumes.
>>
>> Why not scan them and "store" them at wikisource? Or are these modern
>> encyclopedias rather than old ones?
>>
> 1,000 pages x 200 volumes = 200,000 pages.  The French one is from the
> 19th century. The Italian one came out 1929-1938. The Spanish one 1908-1980

Sure. It will take time. :-)

But once done, you will have space for more!

200,000 pages at 10 pages a day is 20,000 days, which is 54.79 years.

You might need to crowdsource the scanning.

How do Google Books and libraries and Project Gutenberg and others do
mass scanning and OCR of books? Do they use lots of money and funding
to pay lots of people to do lots of scanning on lots of machines, or
do they automate it in some way?

Carcharoth