[WikiEN-l] Watch out Wikipedia, here comes Britannica 2.0

[wjhonson at aol.com]

I think Brittanica's model *could* have worked if Wikipedia hadn't 
appeared on the scene.

I, revealing that I am an old fart, ( as if you couldn't tell by my 
cantankerous moods), bought the complete Brittanica when I was just a 
pup (more or less) and paid about $900 for it them.

(To you brits that's roughly in the neighborhood of 450 to 550 pounds).

This was about twenty *cough* years ago.

And I still have those.  About 40 volumes with the Macropedia as well 
and a few annuals in case you know anyone looking for boat ballast.

I used to consult them more than daily.  Now I consult them about once 
a month if that, usually when I find something strikingly bizarre 
in-project.  Google Books has essentially removed any need to consult 
hard print anymore at least in *my* field.

At any rate, about ten years after I had purchased the set, they then 
came out with the full set on CD.  But the catch, just in case people 
wanted to copy it and sell it or give it away free to their dearest 
friends, was that you had to also buy this hardware piece of 
woggle-mucky-mucky-junk whatever, that you plugged into one of your 
external plugs.  Your computer saw that thingie bob, and said "Oh you 
have a legit copy".  So they made sure there was no way to get it free.

That version had popped down to a measly $250.  Of course they didn't 
have to kill any trees or pay guys to lug 100 pounds of books 
door-to-door to sell it.

After they had put their work up online, they realized that their ad 
revenue wasn't tip-top and to try to lure bloggers, they started giving 
away FREE subscriptions to online content creators.  The details 
weren't clear, so I applied, and they gave me one.  So I have been able 
to read the online content for free for a while, their intent being 
that I should cite, in my writings, to their articles, and thus get 
more people to click over into their content.  Obviously to drive their 
ad revenue.  But does this work?

One of the rather interesting problems with that is, I don't mind 
citing the EB for main references, but in today's world, we frequently 
cite many inline citations to incidental things:

"Yesterday in [[Arkansas]], a [[serial killer]] was apprehended 
declaring that she was driven by insanity and the prevalence of online 
[[pornography]]."

When citing in-project we can easily use the double-brackets, but when 
writing off-project, we have to cite to the full URL.  So what does 
Wikipedia allow for this?  URLs like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/serial_killer

What does EB use for this? URLs like
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/34888/Arkansas

another dumb move on their part.

I'm not going to *actually look up* the URL for every incidental 
article citation.  Our project makes it easy to create incidental 
citations, because you don't have to actually *search* out each one.

Will Johnson