2008/12/22 Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com>om>:
Then, I wanted to see what is the value of
Britannica; without
success. It is a "private company" (in US sense of that meaning;
"public companies" in European sense are just companies owned by some
local or state government; and in some specific circumstances). It is
owned by Jacqui Safra, a billionaire [citation needed] [1], who may be
an interesting partner to WMF. So, if it is not possible to buy it, I
think that it is possible to make some deal to work together.
I don't know. He appears to have bought it to keep it going, as a
valuable entity in itself.
So maybe what we need to do is talk to him about Wikipedia ;-D
And I think that it shouldn't be just about
Britannica. There are a
lot of high quality encyclopedias all over the world. WMF may think
about some kind of cooperation with them. It is not possible anymore
to have encyclopedia as a profitable company, so I think that the
institutions which own encyclopedias will be more open for
cooperation; including giving the content under the same license(s) as
under Wikipedia content is.
Britannica is notoriously antagonistic toward Wikipedia in its
advertising, but Brockhaus for instance isn't anywhere near as
obnoxious (they're not *fans* of Wikipedia, but they have more class
than to trash a perceived competitor the way Britannica try to). What
other important language encyclopedias of comparable renown are there?
which actually is quite well in terms of profit it produces. Among
them and us it is a kind of gentle "elegancy". They talk about us in a
gentle manner, and we about them in the same way :-) In fact for us
PWN Polish language vocabulary and their encyclopedia is quite often
cited in Wikipedia as a source of "serious knowlege". We even ask
their language help-desk to solve some our language/terminology
problems and we treat them as a kind of " language oracle" and they
are happy to help us. So, we think our advantage is that we are faster
and we cover the things they are not interested in, but their
advantage is their high level of professional acuracy (at least with
language problems) so we can friendly coexist.
I don't like guys from Wikmedia projects speaking in some sort of
"supremacy" language. Our goal is to create: "a world in which every
single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." so
if the Britannica or PWN or any other commercial provider of the
knowlegde is making their content free we should be simply happy. And
it is not very clever to say that it is just because they feel the
pressure from us (which in fact might be the true anyway :-) ). They
have many values and advatages which we should still learn from them.
--
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz