[WikiEN-l] Paper is not paper

Wed Oct 5 18:04:13 UTC 2005

Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:

> 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.

If you read Collison's history (in refs for [[encyclopedia]]), you'll
see that size was more often limited by economics than anything else;
it took more capital than most publishers had on hand to pay all the
contributors, typesetters, and printers before the first set was sold.
Subscriptions and incremental releases were among the strategies to
cope with this problem, and a number of publishers were bankrupted by
their encyclopedia projects.

The problem is still with proprietary encyclopedia makers; they already
know their price points (nobody will pay $2700 for a super-duper EB on
CD, for instance), so they have to constrain their annual update to
whatever they can afford, and reuse as much old material as possible;
compare 1911EB entries to present-day, many have only the wording
updated (and the references deleted, tsk tsk).

That's not to say WP shouldn't have limits - after all, the OED
definition of "compendium" specifically mentions "condensation" and
"summary" as definining characteristics, so an encyclopedia that is
a "compendium of knowledge" needs to leave out *something*. On the
other hand, our mission statement specifically says "sum of all human
knowledge", doesn't say anything about leaving the less-notable parts
out. I think a lot of our AfD debate ultimately stems from the
inconsistency between definition and mission statement.

Stan