phoebe ayers wrote:
interesting quick article about the trials and
tribulations of other
open access encyclopedia projects:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/12/14/encyclopedias
Quite a lot there about
plato.stanford.edu (Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy), which certainly seems highly reputable and a reliable
source, though I'm not in a position to judge it as a professional.
Not mentioned is eom.springer.de (Encyclopaedia of Mathematics from
Springer), which is very useful for referencing things. But has some
typical problems related to the article's concerns, and to our own views
on experts. There is the matter of updating: if you look at
http://eom.springer.de/F/f038390.htm and
http://eom.springer.de/F/f110070.htm you can see that they haven't
bothered to merge to update on Fermat's Last Theorem; just added
http://eom.springer.de/F/f110060.htm.
http://eom.springer.de/S/s120140.htm on the Shimura-Taniyama Conjecture
manages not to mention FLT as corollary. Having one author per article
seems clumsy in these circumstances. The basic encyclopedia is
translated from a Soviet-era publication. While overall the coverage is
still more respectable than ours, in some ways, there are some issues
one can see with POV in the additional articles they have commissioned.
I can see us overtaking it eventually in quality.
Charles