Jimmy Wales

I mean, it's really remarkable.

I remember when English Wikipedia passed 100,000 articles and when German Wikipedia passed 100,000 because I happened to be in Germany with a bunch of Wikipedians that night.

Yeah.

You know, then it seemed quite big.

I mean, we knew at that time that it was nowhere near complete.

I remember at Wikimania in Harvard, when we did our annual conference there in Boston, someone who had come to the conference from Poland said,

had brought along with him a small encyclopedia, a single volume encyclopedia of biographies.

So short biographies, normally a paragraph or so, about famous people in Poland.

And there were some 22,000 entries.

And he pointed out that even then, 2006, Wikipedia felt quite big.

And he said, in English Wikipedia, there's only a handful of these, you know, less than 10%, I think he said.

And so then you realize, yeah, actually, you know, who was the mayor of Warsaw in 1873?

Don't know.

Probably not in English Wikipedia, but it probably might be today.

But there's so much...

And of course, what we get into when we're talking about how many entries there are and how many could there be is this very deep philosophical issue of notability, which is the question of, well, how do you draw the limit?

How do you draw what is there?

Yeah.

Sometimes people say, oh, there should be no limit.

But I think that doesn't stand up to much scrutiny if you really pause and think about it.