On 8/18/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)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