Wikipedia talk:Size comparisons/Archive 1

message: Linking to http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/Sitemap.htm is not very helpful.
(results in: You don't have permission to access /EN/Sitemap.htm on this server.)
--Icekiss 11:31, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The correct link is http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm emijrp (talk) 11:32, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Bad Link

message: "American Jurisprudence? 1st ed. is an 83 vol. collection of American common law, 2nd ed. 231 volumes!" seems tangential to the discussion. --Twinxor 15:51, 7 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: ''American Jurisprudence''

message: One reason why Wikipedia has more articles than Encyclopaedia Britannica is that Wikipedia has a guideline that articles should generally not be more than 32 kb long. This is yet another way that Wikipedia differs from every other encyclopedia published on Earth. For example, the Britannica article "China" is over a megabyte long--longer than any article on Wikipedia. The Encyclopedia Americana article "United States of America" is 1.9 MB. World Book's article is 211 KB and Columbia Encyclopedia's is 229 KB. Comton's Encyclopedia's article on China is 233 KB.As for covering more subjects, of course we do, but it's my opinion that we tend to cover much-less important subjects. For example, a favorite pastime of mine is skimming through EB and looking for articles it covers that aren't in Wikipedia. See "Culture of Cameroon," a stub article dealing with the culture of a country of over 13 million people as an example. I expanded the section in the main article, though. Many of the articles I created (e.g., Ebira, Tehuelche, Sahaptin people, among many others) are dealt with very extensively in Britannica, but had no articles at all here before I intervened.--Primetime 20:57, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Primetime has a passion for denigrating Wikipedia, and for engaging in an argument with imaginary antagonists who think Wikipedia is finished and perfect - but there are no such people. His selection of articles is crudely and obviously biased. Wikipedia has many articles on mainstream topics which are far superior to those in Britannica; and many mainstream subjects more important than those he mentions are not covered in Britannica at all. But as he has shown repeatedly that he has no interest in carrying out a balanced assessment of where we stand I am wasting my time responding to him again. Hawkestone 06:42, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, I wrote the essay above in response to an edit summary stating that the article length of EB was irrelevant as Wikipedia covers "vastly more topics". I just get kind of upset when people treat pages about other encyclopedias as places for Wikipedia pep rallies, that's all. On the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" article talk page, I got defensive as I noticed some people were pretending that Wikipedia was perfect, especially when editing the article. I don't think that Encyclopedia Britannica is perfect--in fact, I'll admit that I've noticed more innaccuracies than other printed encyclopedias like Americana and World Book. I would add that to the Britannica article, but I'm sure someone would revert me. I also think that the Macropaedia's long article format is hard to use and that the writing can be a bit unnecessarily complicated at times (more so than other encyclopedias but not as bad as here). To say that Wikipedia is almost as accurate as Britannica is misleading because I always thought that Britannica was one of the less-accurate printed encyclopedias available. Not many users seem willing to criticize Wikipedia, so I'm willing to step in for a reality check every once in a while.Also, can you please clarify what in the page scans of the Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste leads you to believe that it isn't anywhere near Wikipedia's size?--Primetime 07:04, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The scans show around a thousand words a page, maybe less. Most of the volumes were below 500 pages and there were 167 of them. 1,000*500*167 is 83.5 million. Wikipedia must have passed 400 million words now. How a comparison with Britannica can mislead about how Wikipedia compares with Britannica is unclear to me; once again you are imagining yourself to be taking part in a debate which isn't actually happening, in this case a survey of the accuracy of English language encyclopedias in general. Your past comments were so aggressive and biased that they didn't act as the "reality check" you say you wanted to provide, but simply seemed to be abuse from someone who was out to win an argument rather than define the truth. Hawkestone 07:51, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That is a very unscientific count, and words in German are much longer than in English, as they are more inflected. (In addition, see Wikipedia:No Original Research.) Finally, see Wikipedia: Assume Good Faith. I am trying to keep the article balanced.--Primetime 08:21, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

text: *I suppose I can take out the passage about the Ersch-Gruber as a compromise. As for the Britannica passage, that does help put the article count in perspective, so I think it should stay. The mention about articles being more broad is a simplification, as Britannica is divided into two sets--one specific, one broad--so I don't think it does the issue justice.--Primetime 08:46, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

text: Much of what you just wrote seems like an argument against word count comparisons in general, and therefore an argument for deleting the article. The sentence saying Britannica has twice as much words per article as Wikipedia means that Britannica would have twice as many articles as it does now if they were as short as Wikipedia's. The sentence is obviously very relevant to the topic being treated in the article. Finally, I was compromising with you by not reverting your changes entirely. Are you willing to compromise with me or is the deal off?--Primetime 17:26, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: What deal? Anyway, yes I am against all misleading use of word counts, but I don't think there is anything in the article which should not be there which I have not removed already. Hawkestone 22:22, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: In any case, it appears as if you have violated the Three Revert Rule, which stipulates that you cannot revert the edits to any article more than three times in any 24-hour period. Violation of the rule can result in a block from editing.--Primetime 22:42, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Resorting to threats just shows the poverty of your arguments. Hawkestone 18:14, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I wasn't threatening you because I can't block you. I was asking that you not violate the rules. Is that a problem with you? If you don't like the reason this article was created, then nominate it for deletion. I can see you don't have what it takes to admit that you're wrong or compromise with me, so that's why I have stopped conversing with you. For example, you haven't explained why we should include Wikipedia's word count but not mention article length. I'm sure you'll figure out some sort of excuse, but I really don't want to read it.--Primetime 20:13, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I have provided more detailed reasoning than you and I am waiting for you to have the decency to admit it. I resent your personal attacks. I have now had to add a verify tag temporarily to cover Wikipedia as the current version contains misleading statements. It is false to say that I am saying we should not mention article length as I have left it in the table. What I am saying is that you should not use the statistics in a misleading way.Hawkestone 20:27, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: OK. I'm going to try this one more time. I'm going to remove the statement about the Ersch-Gruber but keep the statement about article length in EB. That way, we can both leave the article alone and not write messages to each other anymore. If it's important enough to keep the statistic in the table, then it's good enough to put in prose, as well. I found it enlightening to read and cutting Wikipedia's article count in half is a dramatic change, I'd hope you'd agree.--Primetime 20:56, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No it isn't. The number in the table is just a statistic, but the phrase in the text is a biased and misleading criticism of wikipedia on spurious grounds. The comparison is not like with like, and every day it becomes less so. The ground on which you are standing is tissue paper over a void. Will you still be defending this meaningless comparison when Wikipedia has ten million articles. What on earth does it prove? Absolutely nothing! Hawkestone 14:24, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Comparison with ''Encyclopaedia Britannica''

message: I am not going to back down Primetime. The comment was added on 5 May 2004 when Wikipedia had 239,000 articles, a number not completely out of touch with Britannica's article tally. At that time the comparison made some sort of sense, though even then it was biased against Wikipedia (that was the point, it was part of a pep talk). But now it is utterly meaningless and worthless for any purpose other than denigrating Wikipedia on spurious grounds. As it happens, I agree with you that on average Wikipedia's articles on topics covered by Britannica are not as good as Britannica's (though not by much and many of them are better), but this opinion is not based on or in any way supported by word counts. For that matter it is quite likely that Wikipedia's like for like articles are longer on average. I can point to many which are many times longer. The statement that you are defending is not a comparison of like with like because Wikipedia has a much broader range of content than Britannica. Every day the difference grows wider. You seem to be  clinging to the idea that there is an automatic connection between article length and quality, which is absurd. Quality is independent of length, because length is determined mainly by editorial conventions and by the scope of the average topic covered. Why do you persist in defending a worthless, spurious statistic? NPOV does not require bias against Wikipedia. Hawkestone 05:20, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not going to back down, either--ever. Also, you wrote, "The statement that you are defending is not a comparison of like with like because Wikipedia has a much broader range of content than Britannica." and I disagree that the content in Wikipedia is broader. As I demonstrated through my initial post, it is skewed away from non-controversial, non-technical fields. The purpose of this article is to compare Wikipedia with other encyclopedias, so why did you mention that it was "not a comparison of like with like" other than to gabble? You also wrote, "You seem to be clinging to the idea that there is an automatic connection between article length and quality, which is absurd." so back up your slander with a quote where I say such a thing, you liar. Finally, your it's-worthless slogan you keep chanting is not convincing me at all. This article is here to compare the size of the encyclopedias, and article length puts that in context. I find it disappointing that you are repeating your arguments--possibly to overshadow mine. Your primitive propaganda techniques are useless here, so try something else or go away.--Primetime 06:06, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I will not debate with you further, but I will continue to revert. You are not capable of being civil. Read Wikipedia:No personal attacks. Hawkestone 06:03, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: The comparison was somewhat meaningful once, but it isn't in the least meaningful now

message: Just to say that. Maybe some sentences should be changed, but this is a good article and it should go into the main namespace, not inside of Project: namespace. --millosh (talk (sr:)) 23:01, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article is for the main namespace 

message: Again another Wikipedian statistical phenomenon has arrived! However, vandalisms and inactive users aside. First off for mine third compliment and perhaps the forth for this Wikipedia itself, I truly praise, commend and greatly congratulate this English Wikipedia once again for surpassing yet anoher Wiki-record of the One Hundred Millionth (or in figures: 100,000,000) mark of the total Wikipedians' Edit Counts!!! Yet this whopping number of what both users and Wikipedians have made up of this big free encyclopedia ever since July 2002AD and yet they never stop growing (as stated and based on/in the Wikipedian User Statistics)! WOW, what else can I say to express here, man!!? Thus, Congratulations and Kudos to the English Wikipedia! Keep the numbers going and keep on editing and contributing for more! Yaaahooooo!!! --onWheeZierPLot 00:40, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  100,000,000 edit counts! Yeehah! 

message: Just curious -- I know this isn't in the main namespace -- but how did we determine the average number of words per article among various encyclopedias? If there's a good source, that information, and some of the other statistics here, might be relevant for the main articles on these publications. -- Bailey(talk) 00:46, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It is rare for a review to give the average number of words per article. So, those stats were determined by dividing the total number of words by the number of articles. The sources for the word counts are the same used for the number of articles. For example, Enciclopedia italiana has a note next to the number of articles giving the source. That article also was used for the number of words. The same I know is true for Britannica, Americana, Italiana, Encarta, and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.--Tree 'uns 5 01:35, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  sources?