[Foundation-l] Britannica

Mon Jun 9 15:52:06 UTC 2008

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 5:00 PM, Dan Rosenthal <swatjester at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 10:55 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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 :-)

This is the issue related to money. I am sure that WMF may get money
from MS or from Gates' foundation with or without a relation with
Encarta.

>> > 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.
>
> Part of the problem with Brittanica is that their coverage on some things is
> crap. For instance, their article on Bender, Moldova, a major city in
> Moldova, uses the name Tighina, which has been out of use for hundreds of
> years. It contains very little useful information, most of which is sorely
> out of date. Encarta is even worse.  Part of the problem is not the
> book-based model or the expense, its the lack of updated and correct
> information that causes people to abandon Brittanica (for example, my
> experiences with it have been so poor that I cannot trust it to be a source
> for information anymore).

Whenever I want to test accuracy of some encyclopedia, I go to see how
the fields of my knowledge are covered (linguistics). Sometimes it is
so stupid that I forget immediately about that encyclopedia.
Britannica definitively gives not stupid articles, but I was very
surprised by the fact that 1995 edition didn't have correct Serbian
Cyrillic alphabet. Also, the same edition (maybe newer, too) refers to
some books from the 1920s (in English; "completely outdated") and
1930s (in German; "partially outdated") as the best sources for
researching Sumerian language (in 1997 i found very good grammars of
Sumerian in English at Internet).

I would say that a really good information about some issue may be
found at Wikipedia and through external links and bibliography. And I
don't see a sense in reading 10 times shorter article without good
bibliography about some issue at Britannica or Encarta.

But, strictly speaking, their informations are scientifically
reliable, and ours are not. They have a rich field for gathering
articles from Wikipedia and sell the redacted copies with Britannica's
stamp. And we may get a number of high profile scientists who are
evaluating our articles. This may sound as a good deal.