[Foundation-l] Britannica

[Dan Rosenthal]

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 10:55 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2008/6/9 Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>:
>
> > Encarta is not the main Microsoft's business, so some secondary
> > reasons may be crucial in their decision to go or not to go to the
> > free knowledge. And because of that I didn't think about them.
>
>
> In Encarta's case - Live Search used to cover stuff in Encarta links.
> Now they notably favour Wikipedia. I'm wondering if there's room for
> an arrangement of the sort that entails us getting money. Windows is a
> supported platform for MediaWiki after all :-)
>
>
> > But, for Britannica this is a very important question. At the era of
> > Internet [and Wikipedia] the most of people are not willing to spend
> > more money on their books or CDs or DVDs. So, they need to find some
> > other business model. Which means that they may to try to copy free
> > software based business model of big corporations, like IBM is. And we
> > are the free knowledge partner.
>
>
> It's a pity they've been so antagonistic to Wikipedia in the past few
> years, as if that would have helped them. I think the success of
> Wikipedia is that it fills a niche that was basically unfilled before.
> I can't believe that any significant number of the people making
> wikipedia.org the #8 website in the world have opened a paper
> encyclopedia since they were at school. I'm happy for those people to
> look at Britannica, Citizendium or whatever from looking at Wikipedia
> - it spreads the idea that people can do active research for
> information beyond just entering a term into a search engine.
>
>
> - d.
>
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Part of the problem with Brittanica is that their coverage on some things is
crap. For instance, their article on Bender, Moldova, a major city in
Moldova, uses the name Tighina, which has been out of use for hundreds of
years. It contains very little useful information, most of which is sorely
out of date. Encarta is even worse.  Part of the problem is not the
book-based model or the expense, its the lack of updated and correct
information that causes people to abandon Brittanica (for example, my
experiences with it have been so poor that I cannot trust it to be a source
for information anymore).

-Dan

-- 
Dan Rosenthal