On 03/13/12 5:22 PM, phoebe ayers wrote: I've always been a bookish person, even growing up in an environment where books were not featured. I do remember having a two-volume (perhaps the Columbia-Viking) when I was young, and still in primary school. I cherished it, and looked up a lot of different things in it. I don't think that my love of encyclopedias was a factor in becoming a Wikipedian. I think it was mostly a feeling that with all the books that I had already accumulated by 2002 I would be able to contribute something. It was much easier to contribute then. It was fun. I now have maybe a dozen encyclopedias, all acquired since 2002. My latest such addition was 7 volumes from the first American edition of The Edinburgh Encyclopædia from 1832. These older volumes remain important because of the depth they give to knowledge. Fully grasping a subject includes grasping its evolution unencumbered by the static snapshot verified in Wikipedia. This is much as described in the opening paragraphs of Thomas Mann's "Joseph and His Brothers". What these older volumes say will often be obsolete, and sometimes absurd, but that information remains a part of a subject's history. They include the mistakes which enable us to measure our success. The extent to which Wikipedia has burrowed into the modern psyche carries a responsibility that is both awesome and awful. Britannica, with all the faults we have acknowledged and through a couple bankruptcies, remained the prima facie source of information for 10 English-speaking generations. We have unseated them, and not only in English. Ray