Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

The 1911 edition is online in various places - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1911_Encyclopædia_Britannica for details.

Why not ask Robert McHenry, who often writes on TCS (you know, the right-wing astroturfing web site). He is a former editor of Britanica. It seems to me that his main theme of late is the value of information that is compiled and edited by controlled processes vs. the low quality of information that comes out of things like Wikipedia. I would wager that average Britanica articles are shorter in word count, more dense in information, more germane to subjects at hand, and more factually correct than average Wikipedia articles. Just as Windows software is far more usable than Linux software. Open systems don't do a good job of whittling things down to essentials. Closed systems will tend to be less overwhelming and thus more accessible to average users/readers because authors and developers need the user/reader experience to be as perfect as possible in order to contain future support costs.

Here's a recent article by McHenry:

http://www.tcsdaily.com/Article.aspx?id=121305E

Knowing how you'll be fawning over Wikipedia because it's open, it would be morbidly interesting if you got an interview with him to establish your facts.

Currently Wikipedia articles are running about half the length of Britannica articles. (See this Wikipedia article and this post, including the comments.) I'm trying to establish whether Britannica articles have been getting shorter or longer over the centuries.

No David, the average Wikipedia article is half the length of the average Britanica article. Given that there are numerous short, poor quality articles about completely unimportant things that would never survive the first round editorial process of Britanica, you need to find a more relevant statistic. Perhaps take the length averages over articles that appear in both as a start.

I'm trying to establish whether Britannica articles have been getting shorter or longer over the centuries.

and
the average Wikipedia article is half the length of the average Britanica article

Unless you are going to relate the length of Britannica articles to Wikipedia ones, I can't see that the fact that some wikipedia ones are short & more or less pointless has anything to do with it.

If you are going to compare articles about, say "The Pyramids" in Britannica over time, with the Wikipedia entry, the two are relvant.

As to Britannica, do you have access to a library? A decent one is likely to have several issues (and a not so good one might have a few ancient ones!)

David, The Wikipedia article (!) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica has the number of volumes in each of the 15 editions. It also has some of the page numbers and other data for the editions. If you could find the total number of articles in each edition, and the average number of pages in a volume, then you could do the math. (Not that helpful, sorry!)