On Sat, 30 Oct 2004 21:04:13 -0700, Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net wrote:
Stan Shebs wrote:
Another interesting exercise is to look at the 1911 encyclopedia articles. Hundreds of obscure personages of ancient Rome each have their own article, carefully documented and cited, but there is no article for Standard Oil; it is briefly described in Rockefeller's bio, and under Trusts, but there is no encyclopedic description of the company itself, and ditto for the many other companies of the time. Despite the evidence all around them that corporations had come to be a significant part of their world, it seems that the 1911EBers had the idea that corporations were somehow "unencyclopedic", and to us today it looks like an odd oversight in Britannica's coverage.
In their British Empire-centric view, the EB editors of 1911 looked backward to empires of the past (especially Rome), and it's not surprising that they didn't recognize the empires of the future that would displace them. At the time, the concept of a commercial corporation in most cases was still strongly tied to the individuals who organized them, often as family firms, so it probably didn't seem worthwhile to create another article that would simply duplicate information already covered. Had they been using a wiki, they probably would have created [[Standard Oil]] as a redirect to [[John D. Rockefeller]].
They also probably thought commerce was below them.