[Foundation-l] Britannica became free

[Milos Rancic]

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 1:27 PM, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Wikipedia's most important advantage is that it is free as in free
speech. I would prefer much smaller Wikipedia, as I am preferring to
use free software alternatives for a long time, even alternatives were
worst than proprietary software counterparts.

But, we need a basic level of honesty. Not just because some ordinary
reader of encyclopedic content, but, first of all, because of
ourselves. I am preparing now exam in comparative grammar of
Indo-European languages and here is the situation related to the
description of the first attested Indo-European branch, Anatolian
group:

* 14 volumes Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics has just a small
description of Anatolian languages; it doesn't have anything about
Hittite language (the major language from that group).
* Wikipedia has very inconsistent set of articles about all languages.
To be honest, I don't know where to start with fixing them.
* Britannica has a very good article about Anatolian languages and
good introducing articles about all Anatolian languages.
* Cambridge edition "Ancient languages of Asia Minor" (ALAM) has very
good articles about all of them. Even it is a book, the concept is
close to a very specific (and good) encyclopedia of those languages.

The styles of articles in Britannica and especially ALAM are superior
toward the style in (those) Wikipedia articles. Articles in Britannica
and ALAM are very useful to me, while articles in Wikipedia are far
from being useful.

Of course, we may fix our articles. Britannica has an error in
description of Serbian/Serbo-Croatian language at least since 1995
edition: instead of Serbian letter Ђ, it has letter Ъ (hard sign).
But, we need to find a way how to improve the quality of our articles,
systematically.