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Is this just another attempt to make Earth, the Milky Way, and humanity's placement in the universe not special (and yes, you could state that the same argument could be made by geocentrists)? Considering they have difficulty sizing up the Milky Way, they shouldn't be so quick to unilaterally state that Andromeda is the largest galaxy in the Local Group.

The Great Debate Over the Size of the Universe
http://www.aip.org/history/cosmology/ideas/great-debate.htm

The so-called "Great Debate" before the National Academy of Sciences on 26 April 1920 is one of the more dramatic episodes in the history of astronomy... The debate has often been characterized as centering upon whether spiral nebulae were island universes. However, Harlow Shapley, from the Mount Wilson Observatory in Southern California, preferred to discuss his new and vastly larger estimate of the size of our galaxy. Shapley wrote to a colleague that he was coming to Washington to discuss the scale of the universe and that he did not intend to say much about spiral nebulae because he did not have a strong argument. In the debate, Shapley argued that "Recent studies of clusters and related subjects seem to me to leave no alternative to the belief that the galactic system is at least ten times greater in diameter - at least a thousand times greater in volume - than recently supposed."

The 'Great Debate': What Really Happened
by Michael A. Hoskin, Editor, Journal for the History of Astronomy
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/diamond_jubilee/1920/cs_real.html

From evidence to be referred to more fully later, Dr. Shapley has derived very great distances for the globular star clusters, 220,000 light-years for the most remote. The apparent distribution of these globular clusters shows incontrovertibly that they are an integral feature of our galactic system. This evidence has formed the main reason for Dr. Shapley's adoption of a diameter of 300,000 light-years for our galactic system, fully ten times greater than that accepted hitherto.

Our Solar System's Location in the Milky Way Galaxy
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/astronomy/solarsystem/where.shtml

The sun is about 26,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, which is about 80,000 to 120,000 light-years across (and less than 7,000 light-years thick).