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

[Robin McCain]

Why did the articles in Brittania keep getting shorter? Because printing 
on paper costs money. Storage on the Internet is  free by comparison. - 
So why do our editors insist on reducing what might be an interesting 
article down to something so brief it might as well be on paper in a 
book that will be recycled in a few years - or deleting content completely?

This whole idea of editing for brevity and notability came from the 
TRADITIONAL encyclopedia business...  Wikipedia was supposed to be the 
opposite - big enough to include anything of importance to people.

It is socially and historically interesting to compare very old edition 
of Brittanica to a newer edition. For example: an entry on battleships 
would evolve from a discussion of wooden ships powered by sail that 
enforced seapower of an empire to sidewheelers, to iron ships fired by 
coal to the current thinking that battleships are too expensive. In an 
online encyclopedia it is possible to include all these articles side by 
side into a section on the evolution of battleships.

I find it bizarre that inclusion of information of local importance is 
encouraged in the internationalized local language wikipediae but 
discouraged in the U.S. English wikipedia.  So events of local interest 
in a town in Romania are desirable but the same cannot be said of a 
similar event in San Jose, California.

On 3/14/2012 1:15 AM, foundation-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
> But I started getting frustrated with them when I was about 12 or 13,
> because the shorter articles rarely answered the questions I had, and I
> never happened t be looking up something with one of the longer articles...