[Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

[gwern branwen]

On 10/15/06, ScottL <scott at mu.org> wrote:
>  Someone may have suggested this below in the thread, I have only read
> about half of it. But, I thought I would throw it in anyway. According
> to our article on the topic Encyclopædia Britannica started losing sales
> and value in the company around 1990 and then sold for 135 million in
> 1996. All print encyclopedias seem to be doing less well than in the
> past for obvious reasons. I think this might make them open to the
> ideas of selling the copyrights (not the companies) to earlier versions.
>  The 1911 Britannica has been pretty useful to the project I suspect
> that older editions of a number of print encyclopedias might also be useful.
>
> SKL

I tend to agree, but I don't think we should go for *general*
encyclopedias. I mean, I did a little work on the Missing Encyclopedic
Articles project, and my general impression was strongly (from
comparing our articles to EB's, for example) that the benefit from
assimilating another generalist encyclopedia would not be worth all
that much - certainly not anywhere near what a live publisher would
demand. (Britannica for instance would probably demand on principle an
exorbitant sum). Now, a defunct generalist encyclopedia might be
worthwhile.

But I think specialist encyclopedias are much more worthwhile: they go
under all the time and so hopefully will give better bang for the
buck, and there are many many specialist encyclopedias with better
coverage of their area than any Wikipedia. For example, the MIT
Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (perhaps this is not the best
example since it is still active last I heard), or more antiquely, the
Suda or Pseudo-Apolodorus's Bibliotheca.

--Gwern