--- Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Vicki Rosenzweig wrote:
At 05:41 AM 8/19/03 -0400, Lou wrote:
- Complete a list of possible additional paper
books to go with the
paper Wikipedia 1.0. Examples would be "The
Encyclopedia of Rock",
"The Enc. of Science Fiction, with Character
Ibdex", "Star Trek
Encyclopedia", "Enc. of American Biography",
etc., etc.
Some of these exist, and probably more thorough
than we could manage
any time soon. There are very thorough encyclopedias of science
fiction and of
fantasy, for example. The online Encyclopedia of Arda is probably a
better/more thorough
work than we'd have if we pulled out all our Tolkien articles.
I agree. It's really easier for us to compete with a general encyclopedia like Britannica than with specialized works as mentioned above. The people who produce specialized works have had years of focusing their attention on a pet subject. Without considerable specialist attention our topic based encyclopedias can never be much more than extracts of WP.
Ec
What's wrong with extracts of Wikipedia? I have a book called "Micropedia of World History" (that looks like it's part of a series) which is 300 pages of historical events in timeline form. As I look through it, I see that wikipedia could do better than this if we put some work into it consolidating our timeline and historical articles and condensing them. Specialized encyclopedias don't have to be that specialized. For example, I think we would have done excelently on that encyclopedia of American Biography, but it would be better if we extended it to all biographies. We could call it the encyclopedia of people or something. All of our stubs on people would still help, because it's better than nothing if it is used as a reference book. Haven't you seen a 2-sentence entry in a real encyclopedia? I have, at least in World Book (I'm not sure if it counts as a real encyclopedia, though). LDan
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com