[Foundation-l] Britannica

[Kul Takanao Wadhwa]

We are open to the possibility of working with Britannica and/or
if it makes sense for everyone and compliments our mission
objectives. At this point, it would be better if they
approached us with an idea and/or proposal (instead of us
going to them) because Britannica is still trying to figure
out how to be successful in a world that is increasingly moving
online that values community and collaboration:

http://www.pandia.com/sew/672-britannica-follows-in-wikipedias-footsteps.html

and I'm not sure if anyone knows what Microsoft's plans for Encarta
are at this point...but we're open to exploring the possibilities...

Milos Rancic wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 5:00 PM, Dan Rosenthal <swatjester at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 10:55 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 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 :-)
> 
> This is the issue related to money. I am sure that WMF may get money
> from MS or from Gates' foundation with or without a relation with
> Encarta.
> 
>>>> 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.
>> 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).
> 
> Whenever I want to test accuracy of some encyclopedia, I go to see how
> the fields of my knowledge are covered (linguistics). Sometimes it is
> so stupid that I forget immediately about that encyclopedia.
> Britannica definitively gives not stupid articles, but I was very
> surprised by the fact that 1995 edition didn't have correct Serbian
> Cyrillic alphabet. Also, the same edition (maybe newer, too) refers to
> some books from the 1920s (in English; "completely outdated") and
> 1930s (in German; "partially outdated") as the best sources for
> researching Sumerian language (in 1997 i found very good grammars of
> Sumerian in English at Internet).
> 
> I would say that a really good information about some issue may be
> found at Wikipedia and through external links and bibliography. And I
> don't see a sense in reading 10 times shorter article without good
> bibliography about some issue at Britannica or Encarta.
> 
> But, strictly speaking, their informations are scientifically
> reliable, and ours are not. They have a rich field for gathering
> articles from Wikipedia and sell the redacted copies with Britannica's
> stamp. And we may get a number of high profile scientists who are
> evaluating our articles. This may sound as a good deal.
> 
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