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?
- d.