On 8/18/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I think they behave as though they are afraid of Wikipedia. This is unfortunate, because they spend a lot of time and effort fighting Wikipedia rather than working on and selling their own encyclopedia.
I think David made a typo. He meant "rather than writing new articles for it." :)
Seriously though if I was Britannica I would be looking for new ways to make money. Selling encyclopaedias just isn't going to be a viable model several years from now, if it still is. There are lots of good business models that involve getting the right information to the right people - but attempting to charge a premium for being "authoritative" just doesn't cut it these days.
The Encyclopedia Britannica reallly is the best in the English language for both quality and consistency of quality - those of us who work on the English Wikipedia are big fans of Britannica and aspire to being as good as Britannica. It's the gold standard we work to.
Do we? Is there any single area where Britannica is the best reference work? They may be a good broad reference, but for any single area, like US pop culture of the 1970s, or tribes of the southern Sahara or something, there are surely much better works. *Those* are what we should be trying to equal and better.
It would be in the best interests of the readers for the high-quality encyclopedias to continue to exist workably and coexist with the Wikipedia model. And Britannica is very cheap on DVD now - they had a special offer earlier this year where US customers could get the DVD-ROM for US$25. Imagine that shelf of books for US$25!
Yes, and apparently it's easy to find pirated on the web as well. When I mentioned earlier that I didn't have access to the EB page on Wikipedia, no fewer than six (6!!) people emailed the page source. Or maybe they all have legit copies :) (thanks again, those nice people!)
I'm a sysadmin in my day job, but I'm actually not one on Wikipedia! My work on Wikipedia is editing and organisational.
Funnily enough my day job is pretty similar to editing Wikipedia - organising documentation, translating, copyediting etc. Just the subject matters are different...
Steve