Vicki Rosenzweig wrote:
At 05:41 AM 8/19/03 -0400, Lou wrote:
> 1. 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
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