On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 4:14 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Thanks! It works well :)

2008/12/22 David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>om>: Very little. We can't afford to buy it. Britannica's survival in some form is not a concern. The brand and the content are worth enough that if it's current owners give up there will always be someone looking to buy. If it were sold tomorrow likely candidates would be Microsoft (who wanted it for encarta and would probably still go for it if the price was low enough), Google who might try using it to populate knol, Yahoo to annoy google. It fits answers.com's profile if they survive that long. Then there are various media companies that might think about it. News Corp for example. -- geni

Sorry, wrong company name--I was thinking of another one --a truly competent one, Outsell, that has undoubtedly nothing to do with this nonsensical method of protection. On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 4:20 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 9:17 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: One idea came into my mind nearly after I wrote the first email in this thread. Britannica is a project which is in decline. So, why not to buy it? Yes, I know that it is a lot of money *now*, but it may be achievable in a couple of years (I saw now that Geni mentioned that we can't buy it). 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. 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. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqui_Safra

2008/12/22 David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>om>: Well in Poland we have PWN: http://www.pwn.pl/ 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 http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 5:38 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: [snip] Full agreement. My view on WP innovations: (1) NPOV information resource. (2) Website with a permanent historical record (we're not the first, but the first popular). (3) Large scale free-content useful reference. (4) Website anyone can edit. There are all sorts of interdependencies between these and other differentiators— It's easy to argue that without (4) the rest wouldn't be possible… but in terms of the lasting impact on society and our own uniqueness I think those are ordered about right.

David Gerard wrote: I guess I don't really agree on this--- it's been the trend in reference works for decades to split tertiary reference material (neutral summaries of scholarly consensus, published as encyclopedias) from critical surveys and novel arguments (published in journals or as non-reference books). The trend was becoming dominant by at least the 1970s I'd say; a good example of the modern encyclopedia in this style is the [[Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire]] (published 1971-1992) which explicitly aims for a neutral summary of scholarly consensus on each of its subjects, which scholars can all use as a reference point. (Where scholars disagree, it simply notes that fact, sometimes summarizing each side's argument.) -Mark

2008/12/23 Mathias Schindler <mathias.schindler(a)gmail.com>om>: Eek! What's happening to the content? - d.

Do we know people at Arvato? SJ On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 6:06 PM, Mathias Schindler <mathias.schindler(a)gmail.com> wrote:

That's great. It might be valuable to share notes on collaborations between old-school encyclopedic media groups and Wikipedians in various countries. I see a few classes of collabs possible * between traditional editing teams and Wikipedians. These teams, including those being laid off by brockhaus, have tremendous history/experience/tradecraft in how to organize workflows, track sources, follow updates year by year to a topic, and find new experts to provide overviews and novel writing. Generally these experts are not paid much - IME that is not the core expense of maintaining even traditional encyclos. Work together to find ways to help WP benefit from these practices -- and find a new way for lifelong encyclopedists to continue contributing to world knowledge even as their jobs change * between chief editors and Wikipedian masses. Reassess the merit of "the value of an encyclopedia is what it leaves out, not what it puts in". what does that mean now for multimedia encyclos with multi-DVD sets? What did it ever mean for mega-encyclos? How can we provide high-quality top-level overviews while continuing to expand the quantity & quality of detail? How to coordinate what are effectively focused subject-specific encyclos and WP as a whole? how important are the value judgements being made by each group producing a limited edition for DVD / iPod / OLPC / print? what audiences don't find their needs met yet? * between content archivists and Wikimedia : freeing archives for public use. There are a few degrees to this : access/reuse of indexes, access/reuse of summaries//data templates//thumbnails, access/reuse of full text & multimedia. This works in two ways -- WM can be a world leader in providing accurate and high-visibility attribution of its sources [something the projects currently are poor at - contribute text or media to WM and you get an almost negligible mention]. SJ On Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 7:29 AM, Mathias Schindler <mathias.schindler(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 4:14 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: It even works with Javascript turned off, but then you have to click all the subheadings in the topic box to progress to the next piece of text (which can be just a few lines long). The Javascript version is not very user-friendly too, because you have to stare at the loading animations before you can read the text. -- Hay / Husky

"but possibly illegal" you can omit the word "possibly". I dont see a copy left license at their site. On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 3:29 PM, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:

teun spaans wrote: You can copy it for your personal use :°♫