Mark Gallagher 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.
I suspect that EB will be the last dinosaur. It is no longer economical to produce such beasts. Anything new in the future is likely to be limited to one or two volume desktop works that highlight convenient quick look-ups without the need to go on line. Plugging "encyclopedia" into an amazon.com search just gave me 100,874 hits with a young readers' novel about "Encyclopedia Brown" at the top of the list, followed by specialized works about dinosaurs (a pop-up book), folk remedies, counselling, ordinary life, natural medicine, history, DC Comics and mortgages. I thumbed through the first 100 entries, and only the World Book showed up in 68th place, there were a couple of children's encyclopedias, and a large assortment of books covering an amazing range of specialized topics. The attractiveness of these may be that they can summarize the essentials of a subject in a single volume. They have nothing to worry about from us until we can start producing printed single volumes.
We're not *exactly* competing with Britannica. We're providing a free, detailed, comprehensive encyclopaedia ... where "encyclopaedia" is a very broad description, and can include anything on any topic with pretensions to the name (George Lucas gets his /Star Wars/ ideas from us!). We're *more* than Britannica. Much, much more.
Absolutely.
At the same time, we're much, much less. Wikipedia's greatest strength --- our openness --- is also a weakness. The damage left by edit wars, our tolerance of insane amounts of cruft, even the constant vandalism isn't that big a deal --- but inaccuracy *is*. And Wikipedia is very vulnerable to inaccuracy. Where we're inaccurate about real people, like John "have I spelled his name right yet" Siegenthaler,
No; it's "Sei..." The old rule of "'i' before 'e' ..." dies hard.
we can cause actual pain in real life. That's an issue we're trying to deal with, with WP:NOR to cut down on kookery, WP:V to cut down on outright lies, and WP:OFFICE to mop up anything we've missed ... but it's going to take time.
The risk with rules that are too tightly observed is that we could easily lose our competitive and innovative edge. Striving for accuracy is very important, but we need to be mindful of what it means when that tossed coin lands tails up.
We aren't out there to create a new Britannica. We're creating something different. We should look to Britannica, and its competitors, as something to emulate. We should *aspire* to be as good as them. But, in the end, we're *not*. There's always a niche market for creatures like Britannica --- for people who are worried about accuracy (but not money) and are not prepared to put in the effort required to find out if a Wikipedia article is true or not, for example.
Indeed, with all the implicit irony!
Of course, unintentionally, we're hurting Britannica. And we're hurting the other encyclopaedias out there as well. We're bringing an encyclopaedia into the homes of people who couldn't afford the fees charged by the others. Decent and free will always trump excellent and bloody expensive. It's only natural that Britannica, whose management presumably know one or two things about business, will see this and get scared. They don't want to peddle to a niche subset of the 'paedia audience, and they don't want to risk going under if it doesn't work.
There is a point when knowing a thing or two about business is not enough. They have already had to deviate significantly from the encyclopedia model of the pre-electronic age, and that does not appear to have been enough.
And frankly, that's not just Britannica's problem --- it's ours as well. "Decent and free" is fine when there are better encyclopaedias out there. If we're the best the world can offer, then we *have* to be great, not good, not decent, but *great*. We'd owe it to the world, after taking away their best encyclopaedias, to provide a valid alternative.
Whenever I read yet another trivial debate about whether we should have pictures of bare breasts or the like it makes me wonder whether we are up to the task. It is very much our problem. Catching up to Britannica was a problem that could be easily put into concrete terms. Britannica was Number One, and a clear target. There is a huge ethical and moral dimension to being number one, and I'm not sure if enough of us have grasped that.
Ec