Hello,
What does Foundation-l say, that Wikiquote will be closed? I just have
added some quotes!
I newly created
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ismail_Serageldin
which I am going to use in PR, I think. There is just a problem, or two:
- I cannot find where I originally have my 1103.mpg with the Wikimania
2008 press conference from (url)
- I cannot understand one peticular sentence, I have now let it out
(see brackets). If someone could fill it in...
Notably the quote is not from a 16 year old computer freak who hates
books more than he hates spinach, but from the director of a famous
library! :-)
Ziko
Ismail Serageldin
Director of Bibliotheca Alexandria.
* I do believe that encyclopedias are dead as dodos in the old
fashioned way. Let me just go back, because earlier around I was
interviewed and I said: The book will always be with us. Books - we
used to read in scrolls and then they got invented the codex which is
basically the form of the book. It has not been improved on. It's like
cissors, like a spoon, and like a hammer. It's technology that's
perfect in itself and will remain very good. But: What about the
content inside of it? Now, there are books that you read for
information. And there what you want to do is how to get the
information. And it is infinitely more efficient, of higher quality,
to use digital sources rather than the published sources for
references. So dictionaries and encyclopedias are not going to be done
in this very ponderous way of having old books that by the time they
come out the information in them is obsolute. Second, you have to
search in all of these and open the pages and then you go to an index
and come back whereas you can type to search in. [...] But if you want
to hold in your hand a slim volume, nicely bound, of the love sonnetts
of Shakespeare or historical romans, that's a different story. There
is the book as artifact, there is the joy in holding the book. And
there is an efficiency in the book that you can carry with you in
different ways. But I think that the encyclopedias and the
dictionaries really are providing a service. And that service can be
provided so much more efficiently online that they are bound to
change. And if they don't change themselves and go online themselves
... I mean, the old providers, like Britannica, will go online, will
provide it, and will try to, in fact, compete with the model that
Wikipedia pioneered.
* Wikimania 2008, press conference 0'33 (August 2008)
--
Ziko van Dijk
NL-Silvolde