[WikiEN-l] Paper is not paper

Tue Oct 4 22:41:56 UTC 2005

It is frequently said that Wikipedia is not paper. Specifically,  
"Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia. This means that there is no  
practical limit to number of topics we can cover other than  
verifiability and the other points presented on this page."

But paper is not paper, either. That is, paper encyclopedias are NOT  
physically limited in size. Some encylopedias (Columbia) have one  
volume. Some have more. The first edition of the Encyclopedia  
Britannica had three volumes; the Eleventh Edition had 29. The  
current Britannica 3 has 32 volumes.

(By the way, the Britannica states, rather hyperbolically, that those  
32 volumes offer "a boundless range of information.")

Is the print Britannica limited to 32 volumes by some kind of  
physical law? Certainly not. In fact, tens of thousands of households  
that purchase print encyclopedias wisely or foolish subscribe to  
yearbook programs, often for many years, until they get tired of  
gluing little cross-reference stickers into their volumes. So the  
number of books on the shelf actually grows.

But there is a practical limit of about thirty volumes for a print  
publication, isn't there? No, there isn't. The existence proof is any  
journal. Journals can and do grow linearly, year after year, into  
long rows of bound volumes which libraries, if not homes, manage to  
find room for on their shelves. I am sure that some homes have more  
than 30 bound-volumes-worth of the National Geographic neatly stacked  
up in attics or basements.

So what DOES set the limit to what an encyclopedia can include? It is  
not any physical characteristic, whether measured in quarto leaves or  
in bytes.

It is that little detail, "verifiability and the other points  
presented on this page."

The limit to what an encyclopedia can include is governed basically  
by the available labor of editors to integrate, synthesize, verify,  
copy-edit, and fact-check.

What this tells me is that it should be possible to get some kind of  
reasonable estimate of an appropriate size for Wikipedia by  
estimating the number of work-hours WIkipedias volunteers put in, and  
comparing it with the number of work-hours available to the Britannica.

If we're putting in three times as much work, we should be able to  
cover three times as much content.

If we try to cover more content than the Britannica without putting  
in more work than the Britannica, then our reach is exceeding our grasp.

I have no idea how to even begin estimating these numbers, but I  
think it would be instructive to try. 