Wikipedia:Size
comparisons.
Fuente:
Wikipedia.
Consultado
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_comparisons el 9 de abril de 2008.
en
Source material from which Wikipedia statistics in this article are derived is available here; the
Footnote on WikiStatistics section at the end of this page provides technical discussion of this
article.
Currently, the English Wikipedia alone has over 2,420,282 articles of any length, and the
combined Wikipedias for all other languages greatly exceeded the English Wikipedia in size,
giving a combined total of more than 1.74 billion words in 9.25 million articles in
approximately 250 languages. The English Wikipedia alone has over 1 billion words, over 25
times as many as the next largest English-language encyclopedia, Encyclopædia Britannica,
and more than the enormous 119-volume Spanish-language Enciclopedia universal ilustrada
europeo-americana.
Nevertheless, there are many other online databases which combine several encyclopedias and
encyclopedic dictionaries and allowing users to search all of the works simultaneously. One
example is Oxford Reference Online — a combined database of 160 encyclopedias and
encyclopedic dictionaries, offering a total of 940,000 articles as of 2006, with expansions
planned for the future.[1] Another example is Xrefplus, which offers access to 262 encyclopedias,
dictionaries, and other reference books.[2] This all added up to about 2.9 million entries when the
database had 225 titles.[3] There also is HighBeam Research and GaleNet. GaleNet — which is
likely the largest named so far — offers users the ability to search several encyclopedia
databases, including the Biography Resource Center (1,335,000 people), Gale Virtual
Reference Library (594 reference books),[4] and the Science Resource Center (58 titles),[5]
among others.
The largest encyclopedia ever produced is possibly the Yongle Encyclopedia, completed in
1407 in 11,095 books, 370 million Chinese characters. These books were small by modern
standards; the work was twelve times the size of the 20 million word French Encyclopédie,[6]
giving a total of 240 million words, or 21,600 words per book, although it is unclear if that is how
it differs from the Encyclopédie in size. It is also unclear if it is twelve times larger than the
original 28-volume version of the Encyclopédie completed in 1772 or the 35-volume version
completed in 1780. The Yung-lo ta-tien was a collection of excerpts and entire existing works,
rather than an original work. Only two copies were made and all that survives is a small fraction
of one copy.
In 2005 the English-language Wikipedia more than doubled in size, and many smaller
wikipedias have grown by a higher multiple.
There have been 282,885 contributors to all Wikipedia language editions (151,937 to the
English language edition), with 8.2 million edits in September 2006 (3.8 million of which were
in the English version).
Wikipedia is still in need of much expansion and improvement. Many of the articles are of poor
quality and some mainstream encyclopedia topics are not covered adequately. And, the
average article length is only a little over half the size of that in Encyclopædia Britannica. Over
time the balance of the editorial effort is expected to slowly tilt towards a greater emphasis on
increasing the quality, scope, classification and interlinkage of existing articles. However new
articles will probably always be created in large numbers, as Wikipedia's conventions on
acceptable article topics incorporate huge numbers of potential new articles every year (newly
prominent people, current events, media products, physical products etc). In mid 2006 the rate
of new article creation was still rising, but only slowly. As of January 2007 it looks like the rate of
article creation may have peaked in mid 2006, though it would be premature to state that it did
so for certain.
Comparison of encyclopedias
Numbers regarding total characters are based on an estimated average word length of five, plus
a space, or six characters per word.
On September 1, 2006, the English Wikipedia had 1.4 million articles1 and 609 million words,
giving a mean article length of 435 words and over three and a half billion total characters. It
also had about 850,000 photographs and illustrations, 1.4 million redirect pages, over 2.6 million
links to other websites and a staggering 32.1 million cross reference links between articles.
Encyclopedias by size
Encyclopedia
Edition
Est.
Average
Articles
Words
characters words per
(thousands) (millions)
(millions)
article
Wikipedia
English
>2,000
>1,000
Siku Quanshu (四庫全書)*
1782†
—
800
—
Yongle
(永樂大典) *
1403†
—
370[7] / 770[8]
—
>1,000‡
200
—
1725†
—
100
—
1993
80
126.4
1580
Enciclopedia italiana
1939
60§
50
247
833
Nationalencyklopedin
—
183**
Encyclopedia
Enciclopedia
ilustrada
americana
universal
europeo- 1933
Gǔjīn
Túshū
(古今圖書集成)
Encyclopedia
(中国大百科全书)
Jíchéng
of
China
>3,500
1,000
435
—
—
—
2002
[9]
65
44
—
650
Online
120
55
300
370
Great Soviet Encyclopedia 1978
100
21††
200
570
Encyclopédie
72
20
—
278
Encarta Deluxe
70‡‡
2002
40
200
600
Encarta Deluxe
63
2005**
40
200
200
2002 Encarta
40
Encyclopedia
26
200
200
45[10]
25
—
556
Grolier
Multimedia
—
Encyclopedia Online
39[11]
11
70
280
Columbia Encyclopedia
51
6.5
40
130
15.5
110
—
60
350
1450
Encyclopædia Britannica
Microsoft Encarta
Encyclopedia Americana
Meyers
Lexikon
1751-1780
2004
Sixth
Konversations- Forth ed. 188897
92
Encyclopædia Universalis 13th ed. 2008
41.5⁑
*Classical Chinese is a very compact language. The result is very short in size for the same
content.
†
It is said that Yongle is larger than Siku, but it is uncertain how they were compared.
‡
Kenneth F. Kister, Kister's best encyclopedias: a comparative guide to general and specialized
encyclopedias, (1994) p. 450. [Article count is for the 82-volume edition, rather than the 119volume one.]
§
Alfieri, G. Treccani Degli. "Enciclopedia italiana" Diccionario Literario (2001 HORA, S.A.)
**
Number of encyclopedic articles. The Nationalencyklopedin contains a total of 356,000 entries.
††
Kister, op. cit., p. 365.
**Includes 10,000 historical archives.
‡‡
Advertised as containing "over 63,000 articles...with 36,000-plus map locations, and over
29,000 editor-approved Web site links." The 2006 Premium CD-ROM had 68,000 articles.[12]
⁑
Advertised as containing 41,500 articles written by 6,803 authors, 60 million of words, 350
million of characters, 360,000 links, 122,000 definitions in the included dictionary, 130,000
bibliographical references, 2008 Press release.
Size of other information collections
Note that Wikipedia is neither a dictionary nor a web index; these figures are just for order-ofmagnitude comparison.
Astronomy
Language
The Guide Star Catalog II has entries on The New Oxford Dictionary of English claims
998,402,801 distinct astronomical objects 350,000 definitions, and four million words.
searchable online.
The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition
5.5 TB of astronomical images (covering the claims 615,164 definitions, and 59 million
whole night sky in several colours) are words.[14]
available online from Aladin.
Law
Biology
American Jurisprudence, Second Edition, is a
The World Resources Institute claims that 231 volume collection of American common
approximately 1.4 million species have been law.
named, out of an unknown number of total
species (estimates range between 2 and 100 Black's Law Dictionary, Seventh Edition, has
million species).
24,500 common law legal terms.
Chemistry
Libraries
As of June 2007, over 31 million CAS registry The British Library is known to hold over 150
numbers have been allocated for chemical million items.
compounds.
The Library of Congress claims that it holds
The Beilstein database claims entries on "8 approximately 119 million items, 12 million of
million organic and 1.4 million inorganic and
organometallic compounds".
which are electronically searchable.
The Merck Index Subscription Edition has over Copac is a searchable electronic catalogue of
10,000 monographs on chemical compounds. over 31 million books held in libraries in the
United Kingdom and Ireland (includes all
electronic records from the British Library)
Film and television
As of June 2007, the Internet Movie Database Music
claims to have records on 549,131 titles and
2,280,301 names.
The freeDB database holds information for
around 1,579,205 compact discs. Many of the
disks are duplicates, however, so the number
Genetics
of unique CDs is unclear.
Each human being is estimated to have 20,000
The All Music Guide database contains entries
to 25,000 genes.
for 834,069 unique albums, and 14,642,322
Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (external credits (as of June 2005).
link) has 17,270 entries, each describing a
known gene, as of December 1, 2006. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians, Second Edition, claims "25 million
Reference: site statistics
words with over 29,000 articles" about the
Genbank, an online database of DNA subject of music alone.
sequences from over 165,000 species ([13]),
has (as of August 2005) over 46 million entries Jamendo project contains over 3,050 free and
open albums.
covering over 100 gigabases.
Geography
People
The National Imagery and Mapping Agency
(NIMA) (http://www.nima.mil/) GEOnet Names
Server contains approximately 3.88 million
named geographical features outside the
United States, with 5.34 million names.
Thomson-Gale's Biography Resource Center
contains over 1,335,000 biographies. 335,000
are essays, while over a million are thumbail
entries.[15]
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
As of March 2004, the USGS Geographic has over 50,000 articles on famous Britons, in
Names Information System claims to have 50 million words (implying an average article
almost 2 million physical and cultural size of 1000 words).
geographic features within the United States.
The old British Dictionary of National
Biography had 36,500 articles in 33 million
Internet
words.
Over 25 billion web pages were known to
Google on February 24, 2006.
Netcraft logged roughly 92,615,362 distinct
websites in 28 August 2006.
As of August 2006, the Open Directory Project
web index claims to have over 590,000
categories for 4 million websites.
Larger numbers

As of 2006, there are about six and a half billion human beings, each with his or her
own life story. Between 25 and 100 billion more have lived and died in the past, although
almost all of their lives are lost to history. As Arthur C. Clarke put this, in his preface to
2001: A Space Odyssey (in 1968, when the world population was only about 3.5 billion
[16]):
Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead
outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings
have walked the planet Earth. — Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious
coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the
Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this universe, there shines a star.



There are, as indicated above, around 100,000,000,000 (100 billion) stars in the Milky
Way galaxy. [17]
There are approximately 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 () stars in the observable
universe.
There are estimated to be around 1×1080 atoms in the observable universe.[1]
Footnote on Wikipedia statistics
Very detailed statistics for almost all aspects
http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/Sitemap.htm.
of
Wikipedia
are
available
from
Statistics for this page are taken from the Article count (alternate) table and from the Words
table.
Excluding redirect pages, there are roughly (using figures from September 1, 2006):


1.4 million articles that have at least a single link.
1.3 million articles that have at least a single link and 200 readable characters (roughly
equivalent to at least 33 words).
Taking the difference of these two figures, there are about:

100,000 articles that have at least a single link but fewer than 200 characters.
There is also an uncounted number of articles which have no links. The current statistics
provide no indication of the size of this last category. The upshot is that the 609 million words in
fact span the 1.3 million bona fide articles, the remaining 100,000 linked articles, and the
unknown number of articles without links. A rough estimate of the word count in the latter two
categories is ten million words. Dividing the remaining 600 million words by 1.3 million gives a
mean article length of about 460 words.
Further, of the articles on the English Wikipedia, perhaps 36,000 are "data dumped" gazetteer
entries about towns and cities in the United States. It is controversial whether gazetteer entries
should count towards the number of "real" encyclopedia articles; however, their statistical
significance is very much less now than in October 2002 when they were added. Very many
have been colonised by Wikipedians who have transformed them to varying extents, including
to an unimpeachably encyclopedic status.
References
1. ^ Matthew Champion, "Re: How many atoms make up the universe?", 1998