How far we have to go

20 February 2008 by sage

c20080213_words_log_w_iconsThis chart comes from a post by Terry Hancock at Free Software Magazine, “Impossible thing #2: Comprehensive free knowledge repositories like Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg“. It’s hard to come to grips with the scale of Wikipedia, which is growing faster than anyone could keep up with reading 24/7. But any well-stocked university library has two, sometimes three, orders of magnitude more content than English Wikipedia; the aggregate collection of library material is tens of thousands of times larger the Wikipedia. Of course, many books have overlapping content and encyclopedia articles will rarely go into as much detail as books on the same topic.

But most writing that was worth printing in the first place has something of relevance for Wikipedia.

Possibly related posts:

  1. Wikipedia traffic for content linked on the Main Page
  2. BibliOdyssey on Commons
  3. beginning of the semester round-up
  4. Wiki FM
  5. "We Cannot Allow a Wikipedia Gap!" in Spontaneous Generations

Posted in Wikipedia, books, free culture, libraries | No Comments »

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  • paolo: Thanks! I didn’t know about open.wikiblogplanet.com! Wikipedia ecology is immense! ;) I’ve just added myself, see...
  • sage: paolo, thanks! I see you’ve been reviewing some of the important Wikipedia research papers on your blog lately. You should...
  • paolo: Hi! There is a paper showing that “fun” is the main motivation. See http://www.gnuband.org/2010...
  • Beth Lynn Eicher: Code can be art too! check out the link I used as a website Dr. David S. Touretzky’s DeCSS gallery.
  • Eugene Eric Kim: Glad the letter and barnstar arrived safely! Well deserved!

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