[Foundation-l] Comparision of Polish Wikipedia and Polish edition of Larousse in Polish edition of Newsweek

[Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz]

In Polish edition of Newsweek from 31.12.06 there is a supplement called 
"Future of information". Although it is not pointed clearly this 
supplement is obviously sponsored by Larousse Poland and in fact it is a 
kind of "smart" advertisement of Polish edition of "Popular Larousse 
Encyclopedia".

Among other articles describing advantages of Larousse over Polish 
Scientific Publishers (PWN, http://en.pwn.pl/) encyclopedias and other 
potential "paper" competitors of Larousse in Poland, there is also large 
article comparing Larousse's encyclopedia with Polish Wikipedia.

The comparison is based on three articles "Anatomia" (anatomy), "Islam" 
and "Ogniwo słoneczne" (solar cell). One of these articles is marked 
"stub" in Polish Wikipedia, the second one is disambig, the third one is 
normal, long article. What is interesting, there is no claims that there 
are factual mistakes in Wikipedia, however the comparison points out 
that the consistency of text, amount and quality of pictures and ease of 
reading is much better in Larousse than in Wikipedia. As I personally 
can agree with better consistency of text and ease of reading, the 
claims that amount and quality of pictures is better is based only on 
the pictures one can see in articles, completely ignoring what can be 
found in linked galleries in Commons and after clicking on bigger 
versions of pictures. Of course the selection of articles for comparison 
was also not random but made by choice of guys from Larousse. Other sets 
of articles could probably give completely different results.

Anyway, I think the fact that this sponsored supplement put much more
place to compare their encyclopedia with Wikipedia (three pages long 
article) and not to the other formally more serious competitors like PWN 
encyclopedia and Polish edition of Brittanica is interesting by itself. 
It shows that Larousse is more afraid of us than of PWN or Brittanica... 
or  we were simply easer target of not very fair negative comparison.

-- 
Tomasz "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedysta:Polimerek
http://www.poli.toya.net.pl/
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/pl/TomaszGanicz.html