Talk:Yongle Encyclopedia

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Does anyone know the ratio of content in the Yongle Encyclopedia compared to Wikipedia?

Well, http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla62/62-davd.htm says >370 million words in 22,937 volumes for the Yongle Encyclopedia; according to Special:Statistics for the English Wikipedia, there are 1,521,342 actual articles & 6,660,666 pages of various kinds in total. The detailed statistics record that as of June 2006, there were 511 million words. So a naive answer would be 370:511, but that's comparing apples and oranges: English to Chinese words, encyclopedia articles to encyclopedia/original texts, different styles of writing, etc. Even the sizes are highly imprecise: 370 million is really just a guess about the Yongle Encyclopedia, and for Wikipedia, it's not listed how the 511 million is obtained - the pages says "(excl. redirects, html/wiki codes and hidden links)", but is that really an accurate count of readable text? So, the answer is that Wikipedia is larger than the Yongle Encyclopedia - maybe. --Gwern (contribs) 21:08 7 December 2006 (GMT)
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