[Foundation-l] Britannica

Mon Jun 9 14:55:04 UTC 2008

2008/6/9 Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>:

> Encarta is not the main Microsoft's business, so some secondary
> reasons may be crucial in their decision to go or not to go to the
> free knowledge. And because of that I didn't think about them.

In Encarta's case - Live Search used to cover stuff in Encarta links.
Now they notably favour Wikipedia. I'm wondering if there's room for
an arrangement of the sort that entails us getting money. Windows is a
supported platform for MediaWiki after all :-)

> But, for Britannica this is a very important question. At the era of
> Internet [and Wikipedia] the most of people are not willing to spend
> more money on their books or CDs or DVDs. So, they need to find some
> other business model. Which means that they may to try to copy free
> software based business model of big corporations, like IBM is. And we
> are the free knowledge partner.

It's a pity they've been so antagonistic to Wikipedia in the past few
years, as if that would have helped them. I think the success of
Wikipedia is that it fills a niche that was basically unfilled before.
I can't believe that any significant number of the people making
wikipedia.org the #8 website in the world have opened a paper
encyclopedia since they were at school. I'm happy for those people to
look at Britannica, Citizendium or whatever from looking at Wikipedia
- it spreads the idea that people can do active research for
information beyond just entering a term into a search engine.

- d.