Being bold here and expounding a little. If any of you have read the history of encyclopedias *Britannica* put out in its "Macropedia" from a few years ago, it's been clear their management has been living in a dream world. They go on at length about quaint little experiments from the 1980s, while neglecting to mention the existence of Wikipedia as it swam into their river and chomped on *Britannica's* market share like a swarm of piranhas. Meanwhile they portrayed themselves as a 'portal to the Internet', reflecting a top-down information management mentality that's obsolete to anyone who's ever heard of Google.
Bottom line for that organization: they may be cream of the crop as encyclopedias go, but in terms of general reliability hierarchies that's kind of like being the best in cuisine at microwave dinners. If the competition is nearly as good and free, why should the public pay to get their service? Their business plan never accounted for that possibility.
After the *Nature* study it looked very curious that, five months later, * Britannica* management revived interest in dead news by publishing a bitter rebuttal. That was lousy PR. And the head-to-head with Jimbo in the Wall Street Journal shortly afterward made it clear--with minimal reading between the lines--that ol' *B* must have been hurting financially. A venerable institution doesn't act that counterintuitively unless it's hemmorhaging readership and money.
Privately, I've been telling people for years that I doubt their business plan could survive another decade. They may have embraced wiki-ish modifications, but it's too little too late. They should have anticipated the Internet's real potential twelve years ago. Headlines may say 'Watch out Wikipedia', but Alexa says differently.
How many of you are shelling out hard cash to read *Britannica* online? Raise your hands. Yeah, just about none.
Sayonara, Durova
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 4:20 PM, wjhonson@aol.com wrote:
<<-----Original Message----- From: Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Thu, 29 Jan 2009 12:52 pm Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Watch out Wikipedia, here comes Britannica 2.0
WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
<<In a message dated 1/29/2009 saintonge@telus.net writes
I had sent him a scathing email denigrating him for not allowing
direct user edits.
For some time, they allowed you to *email* them additions and
corrections,
and I pointed out how ridiculously last decade that was. And how
if they
don't shape up ...like now dude.... they would be history. Buried
by Wikipedia.
I notice they didn't mention my name in that article however.
Shameless!
It's hard to see what will be accomplished by taunting them in this
way.
Rubbing dirt in the faces of the losers is not particularly
dignified.
If we really are the winners we need to be more gracious about it.>>
Then you're not understanding what occurred. What was accomplished is that they *now* allow contributors to make
direct
edits to the articles. They didn't before.
Sorry, but I hadn't realised that they had done all this just because of your letter. :-[
Ec>>
Of course! Everything revolves around me and my needs and desires. The rest of creation in fact is just part of a dream I keep having.
W.J. "formerly the Artist"
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