Wikipedia talk:Evaluating Wikipedia as an encyclopedia

Question about relevance of WP:NOR for essays
It might be helpful to carry out some statistical surveys comparing the Britannica's coverage and depth to those of corresponding articles in Wikipedia. For example, we might look at a random sampling of the Britannica's Micropedia articles and assess how well they are treated in Wikipedia. Does anyone object to this as WP:NOR? Willow 17:28, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Vandalism studies
something that may be of use in this essay is a blooming WikiProject_Vandalism_studies which could speak to reliability and stability. Some initial data is here. JoeSmack Talk 01:04, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Size of Yongle encyclopedia?
Hi Gwern, it's great that you're being more scrupulous than I am about referencing, but I'm not sure if I understand the WP:NOR objection? There seem to be three facts that might need a source: the age of the Yongle, the designation of the Yongle as the largest, and its likely size, and I wasn't sure which one was lacking. For the first, the EB reference does say that the Yongle was finalized in the early fifteenth century (~1407, from other sources); simple subtractions such as 2007-1407=600 years don't violate WP:NOR, as I understood from the discussion page. Second, the EB reference also says that the Yongle was "probably the largest encyclopedia in history". Admittedly, I should've included the qualifying "probably", but I was working from a faulty memory; however, there really doesn't seem to be any plausible competitor known to history. I'll see if I can find another reference to back that up, though. Third, is there any doubt that Wikipedia is larger than the Yongle ever was? If so, I'll try to find a reference that estimates its size, so that we can reference the "eclipsing" part. Hoping to clarify things and reference them properly, Willow 22:05, 20 February 2007 (UTC)


 * As it happens, I discussed this very topic a while ago on the Yongle talk page before I ever saw this page. My essential point was that you're comparing apples and oranges. One is written in classical Chinese, an allusive compressed and cramped language in ideograms, and the other is colloquial modern English in an extended alphabet (if you want to include all the foreign letters and special symbols). You can't simply say that Wikipedia has half again as many characters as the Yongle does ideograms (or whatever) and so Wikipedia is probably bigger. I suspect it is, but given the state of disrepair of the Yongle encyclopedia and the lack of a good idea of how much to multiply number of ideograms to to get a reasonable size comparison, it is OR to say anything but that they are both very very big. Now, if you get an expert on Chinese literature to provide a size comparison, go for it. --Gwern (contribs) 19:21, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

added info on grade level values
Material on Readabilty values is now added. Collect (talk) 20:39, 4 July 2009 (UTC)