In a message dated 4/10/2009 12:13:38 PM Pacific Daylight Time, ragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.com writes:
I couldn't actually submit the changes without signing up for a subscription (at least, a free trial subscription). I think the Britannica "editing by the public" move is more or less a gimmick to drive subscriptions rather than an effort to seek reader edits.
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You can get a free and apparently eternal subscription by *being* a content publisher elsewhere. If you have your own website (as I do), where you publish your own material, you can submit that to Brittanica and they will approve you for a free subscription. My went a year, it's up for renewal now. I haven't renewed it yet.
I have used Brittanica for links, but they are almost becoming obsolete with the appearance of Google Books, at least in my field. Why link to modern accumulator when you can link right back to an older, or perhaps even *the* primary source for some piece of evidence? So I'm a bit ambivalent on whether to extend my subscription even though free. I just find that I'm not using them.
In addition, a great deal of my recent work, has been on BLPs and Brittanica just does not cover them to the depth that I need. So generally I just rewrite them using most primitive sources anyway.
Brittanica is great however for tangential or incidental links in articles you are writing, but then so is Wikipedia, and I do like that I can make edits directly to it, but then I can do that in Wikipedia. Brittanica is supposed to be written by experts, but I tend to find errors and omissions there that are inexplicable. Generally I find these on articles I worked myself in-depth. It makes me wonder about the experts.
I'm not sure if I like it enough to continue doing it.
Will Johnson
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