[Foundation-l] Stopping the presses: Britannica to stop printing books

[Ray Saintonge]

On 03/14/12 2:29 PM, Joan Goma wrote:
>
> Catalan Wikipedia has about 10 times more pageviews than them. If they use
> a free license and use a wiki then their professionals can copy our best
> articles and review them and we can copy their content. 7,8% of their
> page-views go there from Catalan Wikipedia.
>
> They have 350.000 articles and Catalan Wikipedia 360.000 but there are
> about 120.000 articles that are not the same. If we copy from them the
> articles we don't have then Catalan Wikipedia can grow to 480.000 articles
> suddenly and page-views can grow about 15%. Copied articles have to contain
> links to the source and acknowledge authors. Their traffic can easily be
> duplicated.

I don't think that copying articles is the way to go.  If the two 
projects have separate articles on the same subjects that's still a very 
good thing. They can still maintain their "professional" standards, 
whatever that means. The reader can compare the two and draw his own 
conclusions.

> So their balance is affected by:
> *Save costs by using free software.
> *Save costs and grow faster by reusing contents from wikipedia.
> *More than duplicate income from advertisement.
> *Possibility to increase their incomes from governmental aids and grants by
> publishing using free licenses.
>
> Summing up all this the impact in profits is huge. I tried to convince them
> one year ago but until now I have not succeeded. I think the main barrier
> is fear to some for profit company copying their content and exploiting it
> commercially like them.

Indeed! You are presenting them with a counter-intuitive business model. 
If they believe in an expert reviewed project they still have to market 
it that way.

> But don't worry. I can be very persistent.

I've noticed. :-)

Ray