[WikiEN-l] Guardian article about Wikipedia

Mon Oct 24 16:06:15 UTC 2005

Snowspinner wrote:

>Does Britannica also have separate articles on Encyclopedia
>Britannica, Brokhaus Encyclopedia, Great Soviet Encyclopedia,
>Encyclopedia Judaica, Etymologiae, Bibliotheke, Cyclopaedia, or
>Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, Encyclopedie, Pseudodoxia
>Epidemica, Lexicon technicum, or, for that matter, Wikipedia?
>Because I bet if you count all of those (And probably a few more),
>we've got more than EB on the subject, just broken into multiple
>articles.
>Which may well be a flaw on our part.

I would say not in the least, because we're primarily writing for the
Web. 32 kilobytes (which used to be a hard technical limit but I still
think is a very good *stylistic* limit) is 6000 words, which is a LOT
of text to read on a screen. It's really quite a lot even if you print
it (about ten or so pages). Anything longer than 32k really needs some
attention to what can possibly be spun out.

- d.