Mark Gallagher wrote:
G'day David,
Nothing to do with the fact that Britannica Online
has about 100,000
articles and the English Wikipedia (Britannica's direct competitor)
has over a million?
Wikipedia is Britannica's direct competitor? Where does that leave
/World Book/ and /Encarta/? And why can't I think of more than four
encyclopaedias at the moment? Gah.
I suspect that EB will be the last dinosaur. It is no longer economical
to produce such beasts. Anything new in the future is likely to be
limited to one or two volume desktop works that highlight convenient
quick look-ups without the need to go on line. Plugging "encyclopedia"
into an
amazon.com search just gave me 100,874 hits with a young
readers' novel about "Encyclopedia Brown" at the top of the list,
followed by specialized works about dinosaurs (a pop-up book), folk
remedies, counselling, ordinary life, natural medicine, history, DC
Comics and mortgages. I thumbed through the first 100 entries, and only
the World Book showed up in 68th place, there were a couple of
children's encyclopedias, and a large assortment of books covering an
amazing range of specialized topics. The attractiveness of these may be
that they can summarize the essentials of a subject in a single volume.
They have nothing to worry about from us until we can start producing
printed single volumes.
We're not *exactly* competing with Britannica.
We're providing a free,
detailed, comprehensive encyclopaedia ... where "encyclopaedia" is a
very broad description, and can include anything on any topic with
pretensions to the name (George Lucas gets his /Star Wars/ ideas from
us!). We're *more* than Britannica. Much, much more.
Absolutely.
At the same time, we're much, much less.
Wikipedia's greatest strength
--- our openness --- is also a weakness. The damage left by edit wars,
our tolerance of insane amounts of cruft, even the constant vandalism
isn't that big a deal --- but inaccuracy *is*. And Wikipedia is very
vulnerable to inaccuracy. Where we're inaccurate about real people,
like John "have I spelled his name right yet" Siegenthaler,
No; it's "Sei..." The old rule of "'i' before
'e' ..." dies hard.
we can cause
actual pain in real life. That's an issue we're trying to deal with,
with WP:NOR to cut down on kookery, WP:V to cut down on outright lies,
and WP:OFFICE to mop up anything we've missed ... but it's going to take
time.
The risk with rules that are too tightly observed is that we could
easily lose our competitive and innovative edge. Striving for accuracy
is very important, but we need to be mindful of what it means when that
tossed coin lands tails up.
We aren't out there to create a new Britannica.
We're creating
something different. We should look to Britannica, and its competitors,
as something to emulate. We should *aspire* to be as good as them.
But, in the end, we're *not*. There's always a niche market for
creatures like Britannica --- for people who are worried about accuracy
(but not money) and are not prepared to put in the effort required to
find out if a Wikipedia article is true or not, for example.
Indeed, with all the implicit irony!
Of course, unintentionally, we're hurting
Britannica. And we're hurting
the other encyclopaedias out there as well. We're bringing an
encyclopaedia into the homes of people who couldn't afford the fees
charged by the others. Decent and free will always trump excellent and
bloody expensive. It's only natural that Britannica, whose management
presumably know one or two things about business, will see this and get
scared. They don't want to peddle to a niche subset of the 'paedia
audience, and they don't want to risk going under if it doesn't work.
There is a point when knowing a thing or two about business is not
enough. They have already had to deviate significantly from the
encyclopedia model of the pre-electronic age, and that does not appear
to have been enough.
And frankly, that's not just Britannica's
problem --- it's ours as well.
"Decent and free" is fine when there are better encyclopaedias out
there. If we're the best the world can offer, then we *have* to be
great, not good, not decent, but *great*. We'd owe it to the world,
after taking away their best encyclopaedias, to provide a valid alternative.
Whenever I read yet another trivial debate about whether we should have
pictures of bare breasts or the like it makes me wonder whether we are
up to the task. It is very much our problem. Catching up to Britannica
was a problem that could be easily put into concrete terms. Britannica
was Number One, and a clear target. There is a huge ethical and moral
dimension to being number one, and I'm not sure if enough of us have
grasped that.
Ec
