On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 2:04 PM, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: Re-quoting link to article (more comments below): http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/biztech/battle-to-outgun-wikipedia-an… There may also be a big presumption of rejecting most updates. Their standards may be (almost certainly are) different to ours. Rather than verifiability and "sounds OK and has sources" (I know, I know...), they may intend to only accept the best updates and the ones that really do improve the articles. They may also be looking for major improvements and additions, rather than incremental improvements. Though doing that in 20 minutes does sound optimistic. A 20-minute turnaround does sound more like a "can you copyedit and proofread our articles for us?" approach. I guess the only way to find out is to go and suggest different sorts of changes and see what gets accepted. And a "fact checking exercise based on Google" can be excellent in some areas and useless in others, as we all know already. I really hope EB aren't doing that. Hopefully their fact-checking would involve access to various paid-for databases and a library of books as well. If the book needed can be found quickly (in the same room), 20 minutes is just about doable. If the update is large and books needed are in a remote location, then you would be talking hours and days to update. "Would-be editors on the Britannica site will have to register using their real names and addresses before they are allowed to modify or write their own articles." That sounds like an attempt to merge Wikipedia, Knol and Britannica. On something else completely, the comparison isn't direct: "Founded in 1994, the Britannica.com's database contains articles comprising more than 46 million words [...] Founded in 2001, Wikipedia is now available in more than 250 languages and attracts about 700 million visitors annually. The English editon alone contains nearly 2.7 million articles." Britannica is 46 million words. Do we know how many *words* Wikipedia is? How many *articles* Britannica is? Carcharoth PS. That's an *awful* picture of Jimmy! :-)

the wub wrote: So what if it takes 3 weeks? So what if there are backlogs? Even accepting the premise that EB can maintain such a breakneck speed, whoever defined this as a race to do things more quickly? Ec

2009/1/29 Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net>et>: Our readers and our content writers. Speed of updates is a feature much liked by readers (and back when people where doing WPvsEB was often used as a point in wikipedia's favor). For our content writers the instant results are a significant part of their reward for contributing. -- geni

2009/1/29 Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net>et>: Failing to keep up with deaths is something EB has taken flack for in the past. What you have a passion for doesn't really matter. What our driveby content adders have a passion for does. False. Only logged in users will see them. See the backlog of unpatrolled new pages. -- geni

David Gerard wrote: Well, to be fair, their previous model (ca. EB1911) was reasonably interesting: get some of the most well-known people in each area to write a broad overview of the area, suitable for general audiences. Opinionated, sure, but the opinion of someone with some claim to be worth reading, generally. The real problem is that they still have the authoritative voice and lack of citations, but no longer manage to recruit suitably authoritative authors to write (and sign) the articles. Even if they did, I'd find Wikipedia more useful for many things, such as getting overviews of fields that have multiple competing viewpoints, and pointers into the literature for further research. But I'd probably read Britannica, too, whereas currently I don't really. -Mark

-----Original Message----- From: Ray Saintonge &lt;saintonge(a)telus.net&gt; To: English Wikipedia &lt;wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Sent: Thu, 29 Jan 2009 12:45 pm Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Watch out Wikipedia, here comes Britannica 2.0 Keith Old wrote: will be (More in <What's their business plan? Vetting the information to the standards they profess is going to take a considerable staff to keep up with the work that could in theory come their way. What will be their revenue source to sustain all this? There's a limited market for multi-volume dead-tree encyclopædias, and depending on advertising revenues in the middle of a global financial is not very secure. Maybe a sugar-daddy with bottomless pockets and insatiable vanity? Ec>> -------------------------------------------- That this is not a dead-tree encyclopedia is exactly the point. This is on their website. They do not plan to incorporate this material into their print version. Will _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Wikipedia only lives of donations and has no ads. Britannica lives of selling huge volumes and has its page full of ads... -- Alvaro On 04-02-2009, at 20:44, phoebe ayers &lt;phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: