[WikiEN-l] Britannica quote of the day

[Ray Saintonge]

geni wrote:

>On 3/27/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
>  
>
>>G'day David,
>>    
>>
>>>Nothing to do with the fact that Britannica Online has about 100,000
>>> articles and the English Wikipedia (Britannica's direct competitor)
>>>has over a million?
>>>      
>>>
>>Wikipedia is Britannica's direct competitor?  Where does that leave
>>/World Book/ and /Encarta/?  And why can't I think of more than four
>>encyclopaedias at the moment?  Gah.
>>    
>>
>Because Encarta drove most of the others into bancrupcy?
>
While I can't be sure that Encarta was specifically responsible for 
this, in principal that's what happened. For Britannica, Encarta was the 
first shoe to drop, and Wikipedia was the second.  Among other general 
encyclopedias there were Collier's, Funk and Wagnalls, Encylopedia 
Americana and I could find many others if I chose to research it.  We 
are now at the point where we treat subjects in such depth that even the 
topically specialized encyclopedias can feel threatened.

Ec