[Foundation-l] Britannica became free

Mon Dec 22 22:32:12 UTC 2008

2008/12/22 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
> 2008/12/22 Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>:
>
>> 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.
>
>
> I don't know. He appears to have bought it to keep it going, as a
> valuable entity in itself.
>
> So maybe what we need to do is talk to him about Wikipedia ;-D
>
>
>> 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.
>
>
> Britannica is notoriously antagonistic toward Wikipedia in its
> advertising, but Brockhaus for instance isn't anywhere near as
> obnoxious (they're not *fans* of Wikipedia, but they have more class
> than to trash a perceived competitor the way Britannica try to). What
> other important language encyclopedias of comparable renown are there?
>

Well in Poland we have PWN:

http://www.pwn.pl/

which actually is quite well in terms of profit it produces.  Among
them and us it is a kind of gentle "elegancy". They talk about us in a
gentle manner, and we about them in the same way :-) In fact for us
PWN Polish language vocabulary and their encyclopedia is quite often
cited in Wikipedia as a source of "serious knowlege". We even ask
their language help-desk to solve some our language/terminology
problems and we treat them as a kind of " language oracle" and they
are happy to help us. So, we think our advantage is that we are faster
and we cover the things they are not interested in, but their
advantage is their high level of professional acuracy (at least with
language problems) so we can friendly coexist.

I don't like guys from Wikmedia projects speaking in some sort of
"supremacy" language. Our goal is to create: "a world in which every
single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." so
if the Britannica or PWN or any other commercial provider of the
knowlegde is making their content free we should be simply happy. And
it is not very clever to say that it is just because they feel the
pressure from us (which in fact might be the true anyway :-) ). They
have many values and advatages which we should still learn from them.

-- 
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html