Neil Harris wrote:
Just for comparison, the current edition of the EB has
about 44M words
in 32 volumes. As of July 13, the English-language Wikipedia contained
649,000 articles, and a total of roughly 224M words.
Wikipedia currently has over 750,000 articles, so assuming that article
size has not reduced, it probably has around 258M words. This is almost
six times the size of the EB, and would take at least 187 volumes of
EB-equivalent size.
In my opinion, an article ranking system would be an ideal way to start
collecting data for trying to place articles in rank order for inclusion
in a fixed amount of space.
Indeed!
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/En_validation_topics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:David_Gerard/1.0
One interesting possibility is, in addition to user
rankings, using the
number of times the article's title is mentioned on the web -- the
Google test -- as an extra input to any hypothetical ranking system.
Now *that*'s a new and potentially useful idea.
- d.