[Wikipedia-l] Number of articles

[Ian]

I think the only thing limiting amount of articles is our ablity to
maintain them. I suppose that would scale though, with the exception of
adding information from outside sources which would allow a growth in
content without necesarly a growth in the amount of man power needed to
maintain the content. If there about subjects which need little maintance,
I suppose it won't be too much of a problem. 

The Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada handle their 70-volume encyclopedia
by just adding supplements and never updating anything, so its actually up
to 116 volumes now ( http://www.libroantiguo.org/obr/euiea.htm ). This is
not a good tactic. It has become historical in its own right.

The Swedish dictionary is bigger then the OED? A lot of words in the
latter are not used anymore. I like looking through it and picking out odd
sounding words to impress others with my "English" vocabulary even though
whether the words have much to do with the English we all know and love is
negotiable. Its handy if to have if you need to read Old English, I
suppose - probably ditto for the Swedish dictionary. American ditionary's
usually will throw out old words, though our dictionaries are not really
old enough to have any words (or at least so much words) that absolutly
nobody uses anymore like the OED.

Ian Monroe
http://ian.webhop.org

On Sun, 7 Apr 2002, Lars Aronsson lars at aronsson.se XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX wrote:

> Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > I would never have thought that someone would interpret the 100,000
> > figure as the _maximum_, as part of a critique of us that we are
> > nearly 1/3 of the way "done" and yet don't cover X, Y, and Z.
> 
> One thing that Britannica (or any printed encyclopedia) "has" is a
> limitation in space.  This forces them to set a maximum (above 66,000
> articles, the printed work might be so expensive to print that its
> market starts to diminish), and within this maximum they must
> prioritize what to write about.  Wikipedia has totally different cost
> structure (neither print costs, nor author costs), so there is no need
> to set a maximum.  Even if the article count is half or double that of
> some well-known printed encyclopedia, the openness is worth more, and
> should be the envy of any encyclopedia publisher.
> 
> As a non-native speaker of English and a newcomer to English-language 
> culture, it strikes me that the most hailed reference works of this
> gigantic language group, the Oxford English Dictionary and the
> Encyclopedia Britannica, seem rather small.  The Dictionary of the
> Swedish Academy (SAOB) is bigger than the OED and the Swedish National
> Encyclopedia (NE) is about the size of the Britannica, based on a
> language community of less than 10 million.  We envy the Meyers
> and Brockhaus Encyclopedias of the ten times bigger German-speaking
> crowd, and when I learned about the Spanish "Enciclopedia Universal
> Illustrada" (70 volumes) I felt like I came from a little country
> village to a big city for the first time.  It is clear, however, that
> the Swedish projects would never be completed on a true commercial
> basis, but needed (and still need) substantial governmental
> sponsoring.
> 
> The first major Swedish encyclopedia was "Nordisk familjebok"
> published in 18 volumes (1876-1894).  On 14,000 pages with an average
> of 7 articles per page, this is an estimated 100,000 articles.  This
> Easter I just finished scanning the remaining 5 volumes, so it is now
> online, free for all, on http://www.lysator.liu.se/runeberg/nf/
> in facsimile, with a short English preface.  Have a look!
> 
> The work is free from copyright, so you can use its illustrations.
> I already used one for http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Gatling_gun
> 
> So, despite the smallness of the Swedish Wikipedia, there are already
> 100,000 Swedish articles online, just a century old, and hard to edit.
> :-)
> 
> 
> -- 
>   Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
>   Aronsson Datateknik
>   Teknikringen 1e, SE-583 30 Linuxköping, Sweden
>   tel +46-70-7891609
>   http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/
> 
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