Encyclopedia britannica how many articles

As with the law, there are different schools of interpretation; the two largest of these are deletionists and inclusionists. Deletionists favor quality over quantity, and notability over utility. Inclusionists are the opposite. Most dedicated editors, whether deletionist or inclusionist, are that category of person who sits somewhere between expert and amateur: the enthusiast. Think of a railfan or a trainspotter. Wikipedians disagree on which is the better term.

Their knowledge of trains is quite different from an engineer's or a railway historian's; you can't major in trainspotting or become credentialed as a railfan.

But these people are a legitimate kind of expert nonetheless. Previously, their folk knowledge was reposited in online forums, radio shows, and specialist magazines.

Wikipedia harnessed it for the first time. The entry on the famous locomotive the Flying Scotsman is 4, words long and includes eye-wateringly detailed information on its renumbering, series of owners, smoke deflectors, and restoration, from contributors who seem to have the most intimate, hard-won knowledge of the train's working.

Pedantry this powerful is itself a kind of engine, and it is fueled by an enthusiasm that verges on love. Many early critiques of computer-assisted reference works feared a vital human quality would be stripped out in favor of bland fact-speak. But while accuracy binds the trust between reader and contributor, eccentricity and elegance and surprise are the singular qualities that make learning an inviting transaction.

And they are not qualities we associate with committees. Pedants have a reputation for humorlessness, but for Wikipedians a sense of humor is at the core of the good-faith collaboration that defines the project. It is prone to vandalism by fire, and the article centers around an exacting timeline that lists the date of destruction, the method of destruction, and the new security measures put in place every year since Why do Wikipedians perform these millions of hours of labor, some expended on a giant straw goat, without pay?

Because they don't experience them as labor. This is why the meta side of Wikipedia—the Talk pages, the essay commentaries, the policies—is suffused with nerdy jokes.

But expressing the directive that way carries a purpose. Few architects of a world encyclopedia would think to include a forum for jokes, and in the unlikely event that they did, no one could anticipate that it would be important.

But on Wikipedia the jokes are very important. They defuse tensions. They foster joyful cooperation. They encourage humility. They promote further reading and further editing. They also represent a surprise return to the earliest days of Enlightenment reference works. If it is a mistake to keep comparing Wikipedia to Britannica , it is another kind of category error to judge Wikipedia against its peers in the internet's top Wikipedia ought to serve as a model for many forms of social endeavor online, but its lessons do not translate readily into the commercial sphere.

It is a noncommercial enterprise, with no investors or shareholders to appease, no financial imperative to grow or die, and no standing to maintain in the arms race to amass data and attain AI supremacy at all costs.

At Jimmy Wales' wedding, one of the maids of honor toasted him as the sole internet mogul who wasn't a billionaire. The site has helped its fellow tech behemoths, though, especially with the march of AI. Wikipedia's liberal content licenses and vast information hoard have allowed developers to train neural networks much more quickly, cheaply, and widely than proprietary data sets ever could have.

He was enthralled with the online encyclopedia's content but felt frustrated that users could not ask it questions that required drawing on knowledge from multiple entries across the site.

If there were some way to tag women and mayors and cities by population size, then a correctly coded query could return the 20 largest cities with a female mayor automatically. Instead, he chose numerical codes. Any reference to the book Treasure Island might be tagged with the code Q, for example, or the color brown with Q But of the 80 million items that have been added to Wikidata so far, around half have been entered by human volunteers, a level of crowdsourcing that has surprised even Wikidata's creators.

Editing Wikidata and editing Wikipedia, it turns out, are different enough that they don't cannibalize the same contributors. Wikipedia attracts people interested in writing prose, and Wikidata compels dot-connectors, puzzle-solvers, and completionists. Its product manager, Lydia Pintscher, still comes home from a movie and manually copies the cast list from IMDb into Wikidata with the appropriate tags.

As platforms like Google and Alexa work to provide instant answers to random questions, Wikidata will be one of the key architectures that link the world's information together. There are subprojects aiming to itemize every sitting politician on earth, every painting in every public collection worldwide, and every gene in the human genome into searchable, adaptable, and machine-readable form.

The jokes will still be there. Consider Wikidata's numerical tag for the author Douglas Adams, Q That wink of self-awareness—at the folly and joy of building something as preposterous and powerful as a world brain—is why, with Wikipedia, you know you are getting the best possible information. When you buy something using the retail links in our stories, we may earn a small affiliate commission.

Read more about how this works. His most recent book is On Robyn Davidson. But Wikipedia's English site has more than 30 times the number of articles, including many on topics that are of interest to lots of people but don't make the cut in a printed book. And in my judgment, Wikipedia's aggregate quality goes up all the time. As with other parts of the information ecosystem, we need competition in the encyclopedia space.

There's room for products and services created entirely by volunteers — alongside the output of companies that pay people for what they produce and then charge others to use it. What we need less of is the kind of holier-than-thou attitudes that so many in the traditional publishing world — including Britannica's editors — have shown toward the digital world in recent years.

But there's been an unmistakable sniffing at the online competition. I've become something of a fan of the Britannica site, though I haven't become a paying customer because the "free" service has struck me as good enough, combined with other online resources.

In particular, I enjoy putting semi-random words into its search box and then reading the article that emerges. The site's use of video has greatly improved the results; see, for example, the entry for "volcano". I wish Britannica well in its continuing transition, and look forward to seeing how this progresses. The work is worth preserving and extending in new ways. An interesting compromise between traditional encyclopedias and Wikipedia is Citizendium , a project that continues to limp along but has unfortunately not gained much traction.

Most of the academic work on Wikipedia has focused on making it more like a scholarly reference work through the interventions of undergraduate and graduate students, librarians, and disciplinary faculty.

I have substantially altered and expanded Rick's original text. It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older. This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. If you continue with this browser, you may see unexpected results. Wikipedia Search this Guide Search. English: Encyclopedia Britannica vs. Wikipedia For English Faculty. Encyclopedia Britannica vs. E Guide Author.