[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia v. Britannica

[sgilbert at nbnet.nb.ca]

Daniel Mayer wrote:

> Hm. Is there a machine readable list of all 75,000 of Britannica's
> articles somewhere? If we had such a list then we could perform this
> analysis; cross-check all article titles in en.Wikipedia with
> Britannica articles. 

I don't think a direct comparison of titles would work very well. 
Britannica's articles are what I would call monolithic, while 
Wikipedia's are modular. For example, Britannica's article on a 
given country is usually comprehensive abd spans 30+ pages, 
though there is often a separate article for the country's history. 
The Wikipedia article on the same country is really an entry point 
to all the various articles we have on that country; it serves as a 
quick overview with links to separate, more detailed articles.

Basically, I don't know if the different naming conventions and 
fudamentally different information organizational methods of the two 
encyclopedias would allow for a useful comparision of article titles.

Stephen G.