[Wikipedia-l] Breadth test

[Jimmy Wales]

The website http://www.xrefer.org/ has the full text of several
desktop reference books, including (for example) the Oxford Paperback
Encyclopedia, with 17,696 entries (they claim 20,000 on the site, but
there are only 17,696 that I can find).  These are all fairly short,
in the manner of a desktop encyclopedia, and many of them are what we
would disparage as mere "stubs".

But presumably, these entries were selected by some central conscious
process, as opposed to the random meandering wiki process, and so they
should have fewer odd gaps in their entries than we do.  (And fewer
articles on obscure topics that someone here happens to care about, of
course!)

My breadth test is to select 10 random entries from their work and
check to see if there is a corresponding entry in ours.

A raw number test would make us look better for having lots of stubs;
I'm not sure we want to encourage stubs, though.  It's a controversial
issue, anyhow.  So I'm looking at the quality of what we do have rather
than trying a simple count.

The urls for their articles are like this:
http://www.xrefer.com/entry/218376

----
218376 Klein, Melanie
They have: 2 sentence stub article
We have: no article, she is list in 2 articles on psychology
----
211517 Brandt, Willy (born Karl Herbert Frahm) (1913-1992)
They have: 5 sentence article on this Nobel Peace Prize winner
We have: 5 paragraph short article.

In this case, our article is much better.  The Oxford Paperback
Encyclopedia article does not even reveal that Brandt was Chancellor
of the Federal Republic of Germany.  
---- 
209321 Akali (Punjabi, worshipper of the Timeless One) 
They have: 5 sentence article 
We have: nothing 
---- 
217782 Jagannath Temple 
They have: 2 sentence article 
We have: nothing 
---- 
215496 forester moth 
They have: essentially a redirect to 'burnet moth', a 4 sentence article 
We have: a link [[lepidoptera]] to [[zygaenidae]], which is the scientific name for
these 
----
213209 community care
They have: 4 sentence article, mostly juxtaposing community care with institutional care
We have: basically nothing, a mention of 'community care centers' in [[involuntary commitment]]
----
221760 Petrarch (born Francesco Petrarca) (1304 - 1374)    Italian poet.
They have: 3 sentence short article
We have: 2 sentence stub.  Their article is better than ours.
----
219474 Malcolm (Four kings of Scotland)
They have: Short article on Malcolm I - Malcolm IV
We have: Short articles on each of Malcolm I and  Malcolm III, no mention of II and IV, who
it seems were less important.  Our articles are better than their single article.
----
214901 E number
They have: "See 'food additive'"
We have: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_number - an explanation of what an E number is,
along with a list of them.  Our article is a LOT better here.
----
212615 Prince Charles
They have: 4 sentence short article
We have: 4 paragraph short article, much better than theirs

--------------------------------

Well, I said that I wouldn't keep numerical score, but here it is anyway:
They win 7, we win 3, in terms of who has a better article.

In terms of sheer breadth, we cover 5 of 10 topics.

--Jimbo