Wikipedia's Growth

From The American comes this this item about Wikipedia's astonishing growth:

There’s ample concern about the quality of Wikipedia, the Web-based encyclopedia which any reader can edit and whose entries top practically any Google search you do. But there’s no question about the quantity. The total database grows by tens of millions of words each month. A fast reader who never needs to sleep, charging ahead at 400 words per minute, would still be unable to read as fast as new content is being created, let alone catch up with the vast amount of text already published. The English-language version alone, at last count, had over 609 million words—more than 15 Encyclopedia Britannicas put together.

Take a look at the graph on this page. While still rising quickly, the English version of Wikipedia now comprises only about one-fourth of the total words in all editions, which include more than 200 languages. Among them: Basque, Arabic, Esperanto, Latvian, Inuktitut (Eskimo), and Cherokee. There’s even a Latin version, with a suitably collaborative motto: Vicipaedia cooperandi opus est.