I think the relevent point is, scope and depth is where Wikipedia will easily outstrip Britannica. This is because we have a powerful method of content generation. It is the ease of use of the wiki model, and the open content license that encourages participation, that will give us more scope and depth.
One could plausibly argue that Britannica will always have an advantage in quality and reliability, but I don't think this is the case. For one thing, the Wikipedia process results in a high level of quality. And for another thing, if the free alternative is 'good enough' then the premium alternative will never generate enough revenue to pay for higher costs associated with higher quality.
Tim
On Fri, 7 Sep 2001 lsanger@nupedia.com wrote:
[I am writing this as a "letter-to-the-editor," if you actually have such a feature. If not, feel free to ignore this.]
Dear editor,
I'm writing in response to your article about Wikipedia published a few days ago. I'm Wikipedia's main organizer. I simply wanted to comment on one remark reported in the article, which was as follows: "Walter Bender, executive director of MIT's Media Laboratory, believes that what makes Britannica a valuable resource is the scope and depth of its editing, and free Web-based encyclopedias such as Wikipedia will probably never be able to compete with that."
Of course, right now Britannica has a greater scope and depth than Wikipedia--but that's not surprising, because Wikipedia got its start just eight months ago. But in the interim we have created over 10,000 articles--the best of which are easily comparable to Britannica's articles--and are now adding nearly 2,000 articles per month, according to one resident statistician. These articles are all constantly improving, as well. Many of our active participants have Ph.D.'s or other advanced degrees, and are college professors and graduate students or are highly-trained professionals. Significantly, Wikipedia's *rate* of growth has been steadily increasing--in terms of article numbers and quality, traffic to the website, and attracting more highly-qualified contributors. So it seems very reasonable to think that within a few years the project will surpass Britannica in both breadth and depth. There's nothing stopping us.
Best regards, Lawrence M. Sanger, Ph.D.
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