<<-----Original Message----- From: Ray Saintonge &lt;saintonge(a)telus.net&gt; To: English Wikipedia &lt;wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Sent: Thu, 29 Jan 2009 12:52 pm Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Watch out Wikipedia, here comes Britannica 2.0 WJhonson(a)aol.com wrote: direct user edits. corrections, if they by Wikipedia. Shameless! way. dignified. direct Sorry, but I hadn't realised that they had done all this just because of your letter. :-[ Ec>> ------------------------- Of course! Everything revolves around me and my needs and desires. The rest of creation in fact is just part of a dream I keep having. W.J. "formerly the Artist"

I think Brittanica's model *could* have worked if Wikipedia hadn't appeared on the scene. I, revealing that I am an old fart, ( as if you couldn't tell by my cantankerous moods), bought the complete Brittanica when I was just a pup (more or less) and paid about $900 for it them. (To you brits that's roughly in the neighborhood of 450 to 550 pounds). This was about twenty *cough* years ago. And I still have those. About 40 volumes with the Macropedia as well and a few annuals in case you know anyone looking for boat ballast. I used to consult them more than daily. Now I consult them about once a month if that, usually when I find something strikingly bizarre in-project. Google Books has essentially removed any need to consult hard print anymore at least in *my* field. At any rate, about ten years after I had purchased the set, they then came out with the full set on CD. But the catch, just in case people wanted to copy it and sell it or give it away free to their dearest friends, was that you had to also buy this hardware piece of woggle-mucky-mucky-junk whatever, that you plugged into one of your external plugs. Your computer saw that thingie bob, and said "Oh you have a legit copy". So they made sure there was no way to get it free. That version had popped down to a measly $250. Of course they didn't have to kill any trees or pay guys to lug 100 pounds of books door-to-door to sell it. After they had put their work up online, they realized that their ad revenue wasn't tip-top and to try to lure bloggers, they started giving away FREE subscriptions to online content creators. The details weren't clear, so I applied, and they gave me one. So I have been able to read the online content for free for a while, their intent being that I should cite, in my writings, to their articles, and thus get more people to click over into their content. Obviously to drive their ad revenue. But does this work? One of the rather interesting problems with that is, I don't mind citing the EB for main references, but in today's world, we frequently cite many inline citations to incidental things: "Yesterday in [[Arkansas]], a [[serial killer]] was apprehended declaring that she was driven by insanity and the prevalence of online [[pornography]]." When citing in-project we can easily use the double-brackets, but when writing off-project, we have to cite to the full URL. So what does Wikipedia allow for this? URLs like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/serial_killer What does EB use for this? URLs like http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/34888/Arkansas another dumb move on their part. I'm not going to *actually look up* the URL for every incidental article citation. Our project makes it easy to create incidental citations, because you don't have to actually *search* out each one. Will Johnson

What is surprising is the fact that even though it shows it'd be succesful, given the example of Wikipedia, they refuse to accept edits instantly and they have to pass through a review process. Come on, morons may do vandalism on Wikipedia, but I'm pretty sure only -or at least, the big majority- people that know will send edits to the Encyclopædia Britannica. -- Alvaro On 30-01-2009, at 0:07, Durova &lt;nadezhda.durova(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

Durova wrote: Imagine: If each active Wikipedian chose to submit a single perfectly legitimate change to the EB website their system could quickly be overwhelmed. Ec

EB trades size for reliability. They may get a fact wrong here and there or be slightly out of date, but they aren't going to publish absolute hoaxes and they're relatively family-friendly. Whether consciously or by default, EB has opted for a niche market. Where can they reposition themselves if that niche market proves unprofitable? Their window of opportunity to go head to head on an open edit format probably closed in 2003. -Lise On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 3:05 AM, Charles Matthews < charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com&gt; wrote: -- http://durova.blogspot.com/

On Sun, 1 Feb 2009, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: If you're not trying to imply anything about Britannica's current accuracy, and you're not even sure it's true, then I don't even get the point of mentioning it.

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: I suppose your point is since Veropedia fact-checks Wikipedia articles, but then makes no effort to update them, EB's timeliness would be poor if it lagged that effort. But there is a more traditional reference model, the almanac, where updates are on a one-year cycle. Part of the point I was trying to make is that there are these models between "instant" updating, which WP allows, and a long revision cycle traditional for encyclopedias (of the order of a decade). Charles

On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 6:20 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen &lt;cimonavaro(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote: Was that before or after Veropedia dropped off the face of the planet, the company that runs it was administratively dissolved by the state, and the founder was spotted begging Obama for government handouts?