> Wikipedia is the largest compendium of human knowledge ever assembled, with more than 7 million articles in its English version, the largest and most developed of 343 language projects.

but:

> The collections of the Library of Congress include more than 32 million catalogued books and other print materials in 470 languages; more than 61 million manuscripts; the largest rare book collection in North America ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress#Holdings

To me, "compendium" means a single organized reference, not a collection of many different individual works. More encyclopedia than library.

From Merriam Webster:

COMPENDIUM Brief summary of a larger work or of a field of knowledge : abstract

The library is more extensive, but they don't have the same goals. I'd even argue that part of Wikipedia's quality is it's ability to remain small relative to the knowledge it summarises.

Different things though; "catalogued books and other print materials" is not the same as "compendium of human knowledge". The former is an archive, the latter is an encyclopedia.

You won't find a 1920's copy of a newspaper in Wikipedia, but you will find articles about events from then that link to said newspaper.

Both are super important though, Wikipedia can't exist as it does now without archives (digitized or at the very least referentiable).

Those who object to this comparison might also consider that Stack Overflow hosts about 24 million publicly visible questions. And that's just (in theory) about programming!

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