[Foundation-l] Britannica became free

[David Gerard]

2008/12/22 Tomasz Ganicz <polimerek at gmail.com>:

> 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.


Yes. As I said, just because Britannica is rude about Wikipedia is no
reason to be rude in return. It's good to see we're catching up in
many areas, but they remain the gold standard that en:wp works to in
many ways. The Wikipedia writing style is different - Britannica is
not NPOV, it's "authoritative" - but at our best we do very well
indeed. But at our worst we're still terrible. Lots of work for the
future! :-D

(A tangential note: I consider NPOV to be our most important
innovation - much more radical than merely letting anyone edit your
encyclopedia. The concept of "neutrality" has existed in various
guises, but not like Wikipedia does it, with the consequences it has
as a source of information for the world.)


- d.