I can appreciate what you are trying to do, but I doubt that it's practical. If software could do this it would be great ... but then someone would need to write the software, or is it safe to assume that you would be doing that?
Ec<<
By the time of 1.0 English Wikipedia will be over 200,000 articles. Getting machine help is not avoidable with that many articles. We must have machine help to identify what is suitable for 1.0 and CD and whatever other subsets we produce. Instead of worrying about our different size thresholds, we can try to sort out how we can identify what's important and what tools we can use to help us work more productively.
Think of systems like slashdot.com and how they use thresholds to decide how much detail to show for each topic, with each reader chosing their own and each reader able to vote a post up or down in significance. That's the sort of tool we need here, with every reader able to and asked to help us by rating the articles they read.
When we have that we can use it to let people choose their encyclopedai size, from one volume to 500 volumes. At that point, inclusionism or delitionism just doesn't matter, because everyone gets their own personal ecyclopedia size.
Looking beyond that are editions (and corresponding flags) for censorship levels for child or religious or school curriculum suitability, so we can generate truly custom works for evey group of readers which can use a distinct subset of the work.
Expanding it to images, we end up with filter levels for copyright status, so someone who needs only public domain or only GFDL images can get an edition with only those images in it, while someone who's non-commercial and educational can get a visually richer one with all of the fair use images included.
The puzzle for now is working out just what we need so we can set up a cohesive plan for the developers.
I'm well committed on other open source development(SpamPal) but I enjoy tuning software so I'm following the development mailing list but being quiet most of the time because I know I'm otherwise occupied when it comes to programming. No telling when I'll feel that I can give the development work here the time I'd like to spend on it. My to do list is already way too long.:)