[WikiEN-l] Paying EB customer prefers Wikipedia

[Phoenix wiki]

On Sat, Apr 19, 2008 at 5:37 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://jameswharris.wordpress.com/2008/04/19/electric-cars-and-wikipedia/
>
> (and here I repeat myself)
>
> Wikipedia gained its present hideous popularity through convenience -
> an encyclopedia with a ridiculously wide topic range, with content
> good enough to be useful no matter how often we stress it's not
> "reliable" (certified checked) as such.
>
> Britannica and Brockhaus may be theoretically higher quality, but are
> not right there on everyone's desktop - they fail on practical
> availability. Worse is better. Most of Wikipedia's readers (the people
> who make it #9 site in the world) wouldn't have opened a paper
> encyclopedia since high school. Wikipedia fills a niche that was
> previously ignored when not botched.
>
> So the paper encyclopedias put their content online. Can they provide
> a better website than Wikipedia? Ignoring the process, just looking at
> the resulting body of text? Can they produce content on the range of
> topics people look for on Wikipedia fast enough at their advertised
> quality level and keep it up to date? To what extent can they compete
> with Wikipedia without becoming Wikipedia? What would that entail?
>
> "Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a
> completely unintentional side effect."
>
>
> - d. <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l>


We have more FAs than Britanica has articles. Britanica has two section: a
macropedia with about 100 articles we would call FAs, and micropedia with a
few hundred articles we would call stubs. We have 2000 FAs, so IMO wikipedia
is of better quality.