[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia reaches 3 millionth article

[David Gerard]

2009/8/19 Emily Monroe <bluecaliocean at me.com>:

> Oh, now THAT'S funny.


I actually looked up Wikipedia's word count. The last estimate is 1.6
billion words.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes

"Three million articles" is obviously big. But no-one has a feel for
how big that is. OVER A BILLION WORDS is a way scarier pile of
information. Can you wrap your head around A BILLION WORDS?

For comparison, Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past"/"In Search of
Lost Time" is 9 million words in several huge volumes; Hubbard's
"Mission Earth" is 1.2 million words; Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" is
470,000 words.

The SOS Children Wikipedia Selection for Schools seems very cut-down,
being only several thousand long articles from Wikipedia on a DVD ...
so about half the size of the full printed Britannica, then.


-  d.