[Foundation-l] Britannica became free

Mon Dec 22 21:24:36 UTC 2008

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 9:17 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/12/22 Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>:
>> On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 4:14 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>>> The following Firefox bookmarklet may be useful:
>>> javascript:(function(){Darwin.Upsell.deactivate();})()
>
>> Thanks! It works well :)
>
>
> They called the function "upsell"? *facepalm* Wikipedia doesn't need
> to do anything to compete with Britannica, just leave them to collapse
> under the weight of their own ineptitude.
>
> We should probably run a large public "Save Britannica!" campaign -
> how to save a great historical encyclopedia, second only to the OED as
> one of the great works of Anglophone non-fiction, from its own
> business stupidity. I'm halfway serious. What could we do with a "Save
> Britannica" campaign?
>
> (There are many ways in which it sucks, but it still manages
> *consistent* quality better than en:wp. Better writing, too. A lot of
> us wouldn't be doing this Wikipedia thing if we weren't encyclopedia
> fans in the first place, and that includes Britannica.)

One idea came into my mind nearly after I wrote the first email in
this thread. Britannica is a project which is in decline. So, why not
to buy it? Yes, I know that it is a lot of money *now*, but it may be
achievable in a couple of years (I saw now that Geni mentioned that we
can't buy it).

Then, I wanted to see what is the value of Britannica; without
success. It is a "private company" (in US sense of that meaning;
"public companies" in European sense are just companies owned by some
local or state government; and in some specific circumstances). It is
owned by Jacqui Safra, a billionaire [citation needed] [1], who may be
an interesting partner to WMF. So, if it is not possible to buy it, I
think that it is possible to make some deal to work together.

And I think that it shouldn't be just about Britannica. There are a
lot of high quality encyclopedias all over the world. WMF may think
about some kind of cooperation with them. It is not possible anymore
to have encyclopedia as a profitable company, so I think that the
institutions which own encyclopedias will be more open for
cooperation; including giving the content under the same license(s) as
under Wikipedia content is.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqui_Safra