[Foundation-l] Britannica became free

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2008/12/22 Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>:
> If I understood well, the content of the online edition of Britannica
> became free (as in "free beer", of course). They are putting some
> irritating screen with recommendation to buy access to their edition
> every 10 seconds (or so), but, in fact, it is possible to copy-paste
> the content somewhere else and read it. Hm. Wikipedia doesn't have
> that irritating screen. (OK, banner is irritating, but it is not of
> that kind ;) )

One thing that is totally awesome about Wikipedia is the categories.
Britannica is nowhere near Wikipedia in categorization and searching.
I've seen people criticizing Wikipedia's categorization; what they
don't realize is that no other encyclopedia comes near.

And Britannica has this totally weird feature - the article loads
itself as soon as the scrollbar progresses through it. So even if it
is free as in beer, it is obnoxiously inconvenient to copy text from
it, 'cuz Ctrl-A doesn't work as expected.

And i saw articles in the current online Britannica that are much
shorter than their counterparts in the PD 1911 edition. (E.g.
[[Wilhelm Gesenius]].)

And the article on Occitan language in Britannica contradicts itself
and has no {{Contradict}} on top. It drives me nuts that i can't fix
it. Wikipedia's [[Occitan language]] may have {{POV}} on its top from
time to time, but at least we admit it and welcome corrections.

So Britannica is written by experts and is free as in beer. So what.

-- 
Amir Elisha Aharoni

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"We're living in pieces,
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