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How The Web Ruined The Encyclopedia Business
prostoalex writes "Don't remember an encyclopedia salesman knocking at your door lately? Turns out, fewer Americans are purchasing layaway plans for heavy-bound multiple-volume sets (once sold at $1,400) and turning to the Web for answers, according to AP/Miami Herald. What's more interesting is that even the software encyclopedias are not selling as well, with Google changing the landscape of finding good reference information. 'Microsoft's $70 Encarta is the best seller but industrywide sales for encyclopedia software fell 7.3 percent in 2003 from 2002,' says Associated Press article."
Maybe people just stopped looking things up!
Life in Orange County
Wikipedia. I'm sure everybody knows about it by now, but it's a great source of information for just about anything you can imagine.
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
Is this supposed to be suprising?
echo "rm -rf ~/* ; echo "echo "Exit" ; exit" > ~/.bashrc ; exit" > ~user/.bashrc
Remember some of those awful Encyclopedia CD's they put out? They were buggy and hard to use. If they were making good Encyclopedia DVD's (with video, etc), they could probably do alright.
The Encylopedia Industry just needs a lobby. How about EIAA? Sue and whine when your business model fails to make money. It's the American Way.
You probably shouldn't click this.
Candle sales down... candlemakers blame the electric light bulb.
the candlemaker lobby are asking for sanctions to keep the vital candle market afloat.
Why don't you embrace your slashbotness instead of living in a dreamworld?
For some odd reason, this isn't suprising, since you don't need a heavy bookshelf or storage area for a stack of CD's.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I remember seeing those enycylopedia britanica tv commercials, those were the good old days!
everything2 is also excellent and offers some great insight and even advice.
...was sometime in 1995. This isn't exactly new, given that encyclopedias stopped being useful when search engines were invented... --pete
I'd pay money for an encyclopedia that didn't have an entry about goatse.
In our day, we had 50 volumes in our Encyclopedia and it filled a whole 3 shelves. It wasn't even in alphabetical order and you had to take out a mortgage to buy it.
I can't begin to state how much having the internet has affected myself, and society as a whole.
Never before have the key values of resourcefulness and problem solving been so apparant in individuals and the work place, where before wrote memorized knowledge was necessary.
Having the internet, and refined resourcefulness trumps anyone who has wrote memorized anything. With the internet as a resource, instead of a 30 book bound volume set of encyclopedias, a resourceful person can find answers and implement them in minutes, where before it could take an hour to find information, and then more than a few hours to then find that information was OUT OF DATE.
i love the internet and everything it's done for me. I'm not a super genius, but being extremely efficient and resourceful, and knowing how to use google, has made me look like a fricken star both to peers and my employer.
-Jeff
everything2 wishes it was 1/10 as good as wikipidia. of course, leave it to the idiots here to not follow through on a decent idea. they have the 'reverse midas touch', everything they lay their hands on turns to shit.
Everyone always uses "Google" when they just mean any old search engine. AS if the streets would be filled with encyclopedia salesmen if we all used Yahoo! and AltaVista.
Second, have you noticed that MS gives Encarta away with everything ?
Third: Duh! Universal free access to a worldwide information store is eliminating the need for large, expensive and quickly obsoleted books? My god stop the presses. In other news the Edison wax cylinder is no longer used in favour of a strange plastic disc read by lazers, wax salesman frieghtened.
What concerns me about Wikipedia is that I don't think any particular credentials are required to publish an article in it. I think something like Britannica would have tougher standards.
Back in the old pre-Internet days, I spent a lot of time researching school reports in a set of 1964 World Book Encyclopedias. Even though this was in the early 1980s, the basics were there... or at least enough to suit my needs.
But what I learned was almost never what I was actually attempting to research! I'd have to do a report on, say, George Washington, and instead I'd read through the article on Water. I can still picture the experiment they showed: two valleys built from plywood, one with a dam, one without. Pour a bunch of water into the top of the valley, and compare the results. Cool! Or the "Races of Man" article, with its diagrams of hair patterns and lip shape... now, it's a commentary on how pseudo-science can be twisted to support almost any worldview.
I hope my family didn't throw those old encyclopedias away... it would be cool to look at them, now that I have a better perspective on history.
I learned so much trivia... and spent a painfully long time before actually getting anything done.
Odd how, with the Internet, we've traded random pages for random Google results.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
IIRC, Encarta is often bundled with new computers. Could this be the reason it is the new best seller? Seriously though, I would rather google through Wikipedia or another online reference source then bother with any other kind of encyclopedia.
Sure, the web probably ruined the hard-cover encyclopedia business. Did you know that color TV replaced black-and-white TV? Or that the car replaced the horse-and-buggy? When something better comes along, people usually adopt. In this case, a cd-rom is much easier to deal with and much cheaper than a set of encyclopedias. Also, most encyclopedia have lots of information on just about everything, but for a specific area, they aren't that great. With the web, and specicically non-free databases (I get several through my school), you can get very specific, detailed information that you can't get in an encyclopedia, otherwise the encyclopedia would literally weight a ton. That's why door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen have gone out of business. It's not a tragedy.
Trust me.
This brought back some fond memories of my mom buying a new volume at the supermarket every week for around $10 each. Of course there was that week when they sold out of that volume and we had to drive all over town searching for it.
Encylopedias aren't generally something you sit down to read like a normal book, so the usual benefits of a hard copy don't seem to apply. Searching for an answer on the web is faster, more convenient and more interactive than having to search through an actual hard copy version of an encyclopedia.
Where will middle school students go when they want to plagiarize something and pass it off as a research essay? Will they resort to writing something themselves? What is the fun in that?
Consider the number of /.ers who never read a posted article.
Encyclopedias are not efficient at all. When you have millions of different people in command of so many different areas of information, trying to store that information all in one place makes it a waste of time, when it's all being collectively worked on in a distributed fashion. While you have to filter out noise from the signal, you know good information when you see it. Anything with .edu on the end of it (As long as there's no ~ in the url ;) is a good start. But really, insteead of this medium that we can't change, we're given something much more valuable than the 1400 dollars (or whatever) you'd pay for an Encyclopedia set. This is just the market at work.
knowledge when you have 100+ channel commercial TV to give you that instead.
It's cheaper and easier to update a non-material based information then material based.
Then again book based knowledge has that lasting smell to things that we thought we knew about.
This is a really good illustration that even for a great deal of scholastic knowledge, a distributed effort is better than a concerted one.
For very specialized knowledge encyclopedias are still useful, and it's hard (for me at least) to discount the pleasure of opening a volume at random and learning about something I never had the first idea about. Sure you can try the same trick with the web though I'm not sure the results would be the intended one...
For a while the Britannica was free online, but this is no longer the case.
i only wish the article focused more on the fact that the internet is full of unreliable data. it's barely mentioned. i think it's a wonderful thing that kids are learning not to trust everything that they read from a young age. furthermore, they're learning how to take a large dataset and pick out the important points. these abilities are incredibly important life skills that haven't really been taught in schools before the internet.
-ninjaneer
(Scene : A front door of a flat. A man walks up to the door and rings bell. He is dressed smartly, like a Salesman.)
Salesman: Burglar! (longish pause while he waits, he rings again) Burglar! (woman appears at other side of door)
Woman: Yes?
Salesman: Burglar, madam.
Woman: What do you want?
Salesman: I want to come in and steal a few things, madam.
Woman: Are you an encyclopaedia salesman?
Salesman: No madam, I'm a burglar, I burgle people.
Woman: I think you're an encyclopaedia salesman.
Salesman: Oh I'm not, open the door, let me in please.
Woman: lf l let you in you'll sell me encyclopaedias.
Salesman: I won't, madam. I just want to come in and ransack the flat. Honestly.
Woman: Promise. No encyclopaedias?
Salesman: None at all.
Woman: All right. (she opens door) You'd better come in then.
(Salesman enters through door.)
Salesman: Mind you I don't know whether you've really considered the advantages of owning a really fine set of modern encyclopaedias...(he pockets valuable) You know, they can really do you wonders.
(Cut back to man at desk.)
Man: That man was a successful encyclopaedia salesman. But not all encyclopaedia salesmen are successful. Here is an unsuccessful encyclopaedia salesman.
(Cut to very tall building; a body flies out of a high window and plummets. Cut back to man at desk.)
Man: Now here are two unsuccessful encyclopaedia salesmen.
(Cut to a different tall building; two bodies fly out of a high window. Cut back to man at desk.)
Man: I think there's a lesson there for all of us.
Encyclopedias for home schooled kids whose parents are afraid of the Net.
They'll save a lot of pages by replacing many of the articles with references like "Good children do not ask about such things" and "Your parents will tell you on your wedding day" and "It's only a theory."
Isn't the web the ideal place for information needing continual updating. Rather than attempting to fill volumes, or DVD/CD-roms for that matter, one could focus on authoritative information. I guess were still waiting for that one. But, the idea of linking to associated resources is certainly on of the purposes of this www.
It would never happen to other proprietary sources of information, such as technical manuals or computer programs.
Give people a way to pay money for something that's available now for free and they'll pay every time!
Just maybe it's possible that people aren't complete idiots after all!
Oh. Never mind...
Any generalization is a stupid one.
I love Google, but c'mon now.
<grrr>
I would imagine the same would hold true to Porn. The once mighty magazines like Playboy, Hustler and Penthouse must be taking a beating from the online porn available. But I don't think I've seen any reports about that yet.
I would imagine that all printed media will slowly start to see the bottom lines being cut out from underneath by the internet.
*DrugCheese rants*
Encyclopedias are to research what McDonald's is to food -- fast, cheap, and not that good for you. A lot of information in encyclopedias is inaccurate, biased, or incomplete. Much like the internet. If you are looking for casual information, to, say, settle a bar bet, the internet works just fine. If you are trying to do serious research, you're going to go to the library or use a (for-pay) online research service.
The web makes is easier to find information fast, and with no tie to physical medium, yes, but when it comes to the veracity of the information, it can be difficult to make a case for whether or not it is accurate.
Anybody can type anything and have it show up on the web. Most of the time, it is even well-meaning information, eg, with the intent of being accurate. The issue is that people sometimes make mistakes. When you're writing about who your favorite Pokemon character is, mistaking the stats of Pikachu for Megamonkey isn't that bad. When you're posting information about a medical procedure or tolerances on a shear pin, though, being wrong can literally be the difference between life and death. The advantage encyclopedias have over web content is that everything much pass peer review and fact checkers.
I predict that while the 'paper encyclopedia' business may suffer in the future, the businesses that generate the content may begin to restore revenue by offering information that is in digitally signed chunks of information that an end user can be sure of or by offering fact checking services for people who can sacrifice context for finding out if a specific fact is true. Maybe a publically available article about gunpowder will give me all the steps needed to safely make it, but I might then pay $.5 to ask an intelligent software agent at Brittanica.com to read the URL of that public article and tell me if it's accurate or not.
I love encyclopedias, and I think there will be a market for them well into the future (people still buy dictionaries, don't they?), but part of capitalism is keeping your business relevant, and it looks like the encyclopedia companies have some challenges ahead of them.
But with children now often knowing their way around a computer before they know how to read, it's almost like forcing students to use slide rules when they know calculators can do the job faster.
Funny back in my day (at least at high school level) I was discouraged from using encyclopedias because they didn't have enough depth. Funny how times have changed and it seems like we're encouraging instead.
Personally though I think of this as a typical example of obsoletion. However it's not to say that such summaries aren't easily replaceable on the web. For me a good replica of the encyclopedia experience is best found at Wikipedia.org. To the point that I would even be willing to pay for the content in Wikipedia. There I can just lazily browse whatever I feel like with interesting suggestions if all I want to do is curl up to a mug of spicy apple cider and enjoy an evening learning something interesting...
...in bed
Before the Internet, for me, the World Book Encyclopedias was its precursor. Being the nerd that I was, I would randomly pick a volume and then random turn to a page and read an article about something. Then at the bottom of each article, it would list the related article and I would grab those volumes and read the articles and follow more links. Pretty soon, half of the volumes would be on the floor. Today, that habit has been replaced by Slashdot, Google, and tabbed browsing :-) Old habits die hard.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Well, after having worked on Wikipedia for a few years more or less, I learned that books in the library may be "authoritative", but that doesn't mean crap most of the time. They are often biased, faddish, outdated or just plain wrong. More and more I'm learning that as far as learning goes, it's getting less important that sources are "authoritative" and more important that the source is verifiable and defensible.
Wikipedia is a world treasure.
Just another example of how technology occasionally renders business models obsolete. No sense in crying about it. That's just the way the cookie crumbles...
...unless you're the RIAA, in which case you should lobby (read as: bribe) Congress to protect your anachronistic business model and defy the march of progress with the stroke of a rights-annulling pen.
I know, I'm preaching to the choir. But maybe you can use this example when you try to explain the outrage to your friends. Your Congressman may have been "swayed" by the RIAA, but the people that elect him haven't.
What Would Jesus Do
(for a Klondike bar)?
Because even though Google or Wikipedia and, well, the entire internet, are nice and/or useful, the information they carry is hardly worthy of trust.
But to be honest, my encyclopedia (Britannica, paper edition) is circa 1975 and I don't really take what it says at face value anymore when it comes to high-technologies and the latest and greatest in science. But for 99.9% of its content, it's just fine, which it just as well because it cost me over $1000 when I bought it!
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
A friend's kid turned in a report on General Lee full of references to a 'Boss Hogg', a guy named 'Roscoe P. Coltrane', and some woman named 'Daisy', and it turns out that wasn't what the teacher had in mind.
The software versions don't match the quality or quantity of the binded versions. Really, with technology, offer a few DVD's with background on history, wars, animals, etc. Maybe offer a few video clips, but stay away from the whole the whole "Media Overload" like Encarta. 1 Paragraph or 1 line for a subject really is weak.
Encarta has been getting better, but the first few releases where total fluff. Same with Grolier.
I've looked at the binded versions, but for 1400 bux, or 2300 for deluxe study guides I'd rather have it on my PC.
How about offer a 250 dollar deluxe DVD series, with bi-yearly updates? Something with lots of content and updated content.
I bought the entire National Geographic on CD set for over 100 dollars (minus paid ads, but would of liked them also), and its a wonderful resource.
It has been some 4 years ago now that I had an encyclopedia seller visit my house (selling the Encyclopedia Brittanica actually).
He called in advance, and I explained to him that if anything, I would be interested in an electronic version of it and possibly in a subscription for a web based version.
The guy sayd those things were available and I asked if he could demonstrate them and he said he would.
Wgen arriving at my place, he had a suitcase of paper with him, which looked all nice but was noit what I asked for. He did not have an electronic version with him.
The guy got rather pissed at me when I told him that I was not going to do any business with him because of this.
Now, EB could have sold me an encyclopedia but didn't due to this stupid salesman, not because of the web or anythign else.
I'm happily using the web now, and used encarta for a while. They will do for many things.
[given two things:
1. they are still available
2. i actually end up with kids one day]
I spent a lot of time when I was 6-12 years old reading my parents encyclopedia's and old college textbooks from cover to cover. I can still recall a lot of things (over 20 years later) that I read when I was a kid that have stuck with me, without further exposure or reinforcement.
Actually, scratch #1 up there, if they aren't available, I'll find an antique set for them.
But it does want to be a lot cheaper than $1400 or so for a bunch of huge hardbound books. When CD-ROM based encyclopedias and the Internet combine to give you almost all the same information, but more current and easier to access, the big hardbound dead-tree version is history.
This just demonstrates it. I'm surprised the revenue dropoff hasn't been even steeper. The future for the encyclopedia makers is not in book publishing, it's in research licensing. There's a lot of quality research tied up in them, that people will pay for in the right places. Finding them is another story, though. Good luck!
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Encyclopedias were great for quick facts. If one needed to look up a brief explanation of something, you found yourself an encyclopedia and thumbed through it. Well, with a DSL line and Google, it's a faster, cheaper, and more convenient way to get information.
As for written assignments, encyclopedias aren't too valid as sources of info, so as a child hits his teens and the assignments get more "challenging," the need for an encyclopedia diminishes.
Gone also are those "Internet Yellow Pages" books with URLS in them, and any other compilations of information that change more rapidly than any print publication could.
I love my books, you cant quite get the same enjoyment out of a quick google, than you can out of looking through an encylopedia searching for in-depth information on a wide range of topics.
:P
The internet is amazing, and has its uses, but for me it will still never superceed books in general. Sometimes its quicker to find stuff in a book than it is online. And of course that doesnt just apply to encylopedias. I have a fairly large collection of books, and I still keep expanding. Its a bit difficult to curl up with a computer to read a few chapters before bed
If at first you DON'T succeed, Skydiving is NOT for YOU!!
Looks like the porn industry will have to focus on big breasted women fucking pizza delivery guys.
I'm shocked! Old businesses with a strong attachment to their traditional business model are finding it difficult to change, you say? And to add injury to insult, you also tell me that they're suffering economically for this very reason? I can hardly believe it. Why, next you'll tell me that our beloved American recording industry has also fallen prey to the ogre that is technology, and that the telephone companies are having to scramble to avoid obsolescence...
RIAA claims decrease in Encarta due to illegal downloading and swapping.
Show me an encyclopedia that can tell me Darl's phone number, and I'll show you an encyclopedia that stands a chance against Wikipedia and google.
Seriously -- the static collection of information just can't keep up with the volume and diversity of information that people seek nowadays. They used to be the first stop for information, mostly due to lack of options.
Now, we have to settle for Google until the first edition of the real HHGTG comes out.
I'll be the first to say that, for encyclopedia-level research, I do just about ALL of it online. Don't think there's anyone on this site who does any differently.
But, as a teenager, I got a full Encyclopaedia Brittanica from my grandmother as a gift. And the nerd in me couldn't keep me from picking up a random volume, leafing through it and waiting for something to catch my eye.
The variation on that would be that I'd look something up, and, in the process of finding the right page, some other entry would catch my eye and I'd read up on something (usually completely unrelated) after finding what I'd originally gone looking for.
Hypertext kicks ass. Ain't no arguing against that one. But search engines show you what you were looking for - it's a lot harder to 'stumble across' completely unexpected stuff on online reference engines. I ain't buying another paper encyclopedia, to be sure... at least not at the price my grandmother paid for mine... but, in the quest for pure, unadulterated trivia, there ain't nothing like it...
.. like the encyclopedia business has some competition. Perhaps they should innovate?
"Derp de derp."
That is all.
Unfortunately, I remember encylopedia salesmen a bit too well. During mid 1980s I received an offer that said "free desk reference set if you respond". I responded and when the salesman went to schedule a sales appointment, I told him "you are welcome to come, but I have no intention of buying encyclopedia Britanica." He said then he wouldn't come. I pointed out that their offer still said, "free desk reference set" and this seemed like a fraudulent business practice. His response was, "then take it up with the FTC."
So, I wrote the FTC and the local BBB. I also sent a copy in care of "Presidents office, Encyclopedia Britanica". My letter didn't get any visible response from FTC or BBB, but I did get a phone call from the legal office at Encyclopedia Britanica. They carefully explained that what happened was not their policy. Shortly thereafter a local rep of Encyclopedia Britanica called to apologize, indicated that the salesperson had been fired and came to provide both a sales call and desk reference set. I listened politely, said "no thanks" and still feel bad for causing someone to lose their job.
I haven't used the DVD version, but I assume the articles are as good. By comparison MS Encarta is a joke. It has a lot of articles but they're half the length of Britannica's at best. The atlas is good though and is probably the killer feature in the 'Deluxe' version and it's the reason I own it.
I guess the ultimate encyclopedia would combine the articles from Britannica with the atlas from Encarta.
Still, neither of them is free. Happily Wikipedia has filled that vacuum quite nicely. I'm sure some of the content is pretty dodgy (or pointless), but it does benefit from a great breadth of articles and a keen team of volunteer editors to keep it going.
According to a college instructor I had, high school graduates are supposed to be taught enough that encyclopedias are too simplistic. I somewhat doubt it, but it's possible that K-12 schools are doing a better job? I won't brag that the books couldn't teach me anything, but I do remember them being somewhat "shallow".
(Full disclosure - I'm a wikipedia admin) - The premise of Wikipedia is that you can write an article on everything. Unlike major encyclopedias (which might go through 2 or 3 pairs of eyes tops), though, everything on Wikipedia gets peer reviewed many times over. I've seen articles where several dozen people who have modified it. In and of itself, that's an effective form of peer review.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
How natural progression inevitably will destroy commercialism. ;)
What would you rather have, a four pound notebook that can index ten times the data in a second, or four hundred pounds of thirty year-old data records bending your bookshelf?
An encyclopedia -- whether a dvd of compressed data or a twenty volume set of real books -- isn't something that you need to update every year: most of the information doesn't change frequently enough to warrant this.
It's more a case of such libraries of information decaying from bit rot over a longer period of time.
Im sorry to sound crass, but the overwhelming cost of encyclopedias was:
1)The cost of printing. This is expensive when you consider the cost of 24 Hardcover books.
2)The cost of fact checking. Again, this is expensive, as your credibility relies on your information being correct.
With the freedom of information that the internet has provided us, (1) is a non-issue. (2) However, is still an important one. As we all know, just because its posted on the internet (in duplicate at times!) its not always true. In the end, you might just end up with what you paid for, or you might end up reading a factual, cutting edge lab study that was posted the week previous. Personally? I use wikopedia and everything2.com when im looking up something that piques my interest. When im writing a paper? I'm going to be hitting up a libray and dusting off an encylopedia. Sure i'd use internet sources (read:google) as a tool, but id be extremely carefull with my sources.
The Goatse article was Wikipedia's 7th most active article in February, with 24,425 hits.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Hey look everybody! The first Randroid of Spring!
The difference is that a good Encyclopedia is actually vetted. Not so the Net of Lies.
I seem to remember ads in 1994 you that could fit an ENTIRE ENCYCLOPEDIA onto just one CD-rom, and that it would also include movies, interactive pictures, etc?
For bound encyclopedias, it's a cost/benefit analysis. For $1400, you can get 2 1/2 years of high speed internet access, with pretty much all the information you can handle. Encyclopedias are just too expensive for what you get.
Then again, an encyclopedia produced just last year would report the nation of Iraq as a Democracy, not the currently accurate "Military Dictatorship". But, many web sites are out of date, as well.
I guess it all comes down to a modified version of the "library skills" and "critical thinking" we were supposed to have learned in grade school. Can you locate credible infomation and differentiate it from discredible information?
:wq
In my experience the wiki, there are usually enough conscientious contributors that wiki trolling and pure bullcrap get taken care of pretty quickly.
In this example I (RatOmeter) added a section to 'Batteries' and 16 whole minutes later, someone (Heron) came by and cleaned up some mis-abbreviations I used: Batteries
Net has a lot of information, but excluding some projects as wikipedia or project gutenberg, you can't allways trust the source. Here in Spain I've been hoaxes believed and reaching the mass media just because "Internet said it". Not everything in the net is trustable, and a good encyclopedia, at least, has a name you can cite. Also, encyclopedias use to have a neutral point of view, so important in wikipedia, some would remind, and it's not the same information and opinion. Obviously encyclopedias, in printed format, are outdated quickly, but the problem is paper, not the thing itself, probably going online and digital is the best way to compete with a Google that is not what it used to and an Internet full of hoaxes and not so neutral points of view where finding truth is too hard.
DON'T PANIC
Wikipedia worries me less than Google.
With Wikipedia, there's the assumptions that there is at least a few people who might know something about a topic who happen upon it. Just because there's no "formal" criticism of the content doesn't mean that it doesn't get critiqued and fact-checked.
Google, on the other hand, has no fact checking ability. And, making things worse, for Google to fact check itself would ruin all of the reasons why people would want to use it in the first place.
So there's really no way to prevent somebody's kid from somehow managing to confuse neo-nazi websites for reliable sources while writing a paper about Hitler.
Gentoo Sucks
Why do I have to go to kuro5hin for news that matters?!!!!
I have myself correct some significant errors (the date of Father's day was a week off. Nearly gave me a heart attack), but Britannica isn't perfect either. I usually double-check things from either source if it's something particularly important.
I recall a specifc project in Social Studies that requied the class to make an economic comparison of the G7 countries. My only source was the Encyclopedia Britannica and the information was already six years out of date. Of course, I lost marks for using out of date information. Where else could a high school student obtain up to date economic information? I wasn't about to go through every issue of Business Weekly to get it.
With the Internet, I could have that information in a few minutes, even seconds if I find a good source. Encyclopedias just cannot compete with such instantaneous and nearly cost free knowledge.
James Burke has touched on this phenomenon is his latest series of books. That the explosion and specialization of knowledge has lead to where we are today, that no one really "knows" anything anymore and that as soon as something is discovered it is obsolete. Those that will prosper the most in the future will have skills that lead to them the sources of knowledge they require without the need to retain that knowledge for themselves (his theory).
In the light of this I'm not surprised that the print sales are down. I'm perhaps more surprised that the electronic ones aren't doing better - results from the venerable Wikipedia (generally) excepted, I'd trust an encyclopedia before Google for general basic research. It's not so much a problem for me, but young people don't have as finely tuned BS detectors as older folks; they believe anything they read on the net. It's near impossible to get them to limit themselves to peer-reviewed sources in their papers, and they really do come back with some absolute crap from some random website.
Parents would do well to consider this when weighing Google against a good CD/DVD-ROM or a subscription to britannica.com; it's a lot cheaper than the print version used to be, and it's guaranteed quality information. Google is an invaluable tool, but it doesn't replace traditional sources of information. (At least until Google Print comes out of beta - then we really will be somewhere.)
Encyclopedias hold a special place in my heart. When I was entering college, some of my older relatives decided to dump, excuse me, bless me with their collection of encyclopedias from the early 80s. Ah, yes, these 15 year old fountains of knowledge would really be a blessing for me to get the most out of my college education.
Years later, as I was cleaning out the house, I came across a dusty pile of now 20-year old encyclopedias. I was going to throw them out, but then said relatives looked on me with disdain, at how I was throwing away their precious gifts. They said they would take them, rather than allow them to be thrown away. 2 months later, when they never came to pick them up, I threw them out. And they've never asked about them again. Although, knowing these relatives, they'd probably demand I pay them the "fair" value of the books. So, not what they'd be worth to someone who lives in the real world (absolutely nothing), but the price they paid for the books + interest + inflation. Gotta love family...
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
Who buys encyclopedias? By and large, libraries buy encyclopedias, and anxious parents who want to give their children a leg up.
Even though the quality of Britannica hasn't changed, and libraries still buy encyclopedias, parents who are concerned about their kids' ability to learn will buy them a computer.
This isn't news. Look at the Amazon description for the book Blown to Bits by some BCG consultants. The book describes the problem with the encyclopedia business.
My monitor is sitting on 3 of them right now, the printer on another 2.
Salesman: Burglar! (longish pause while he waits, he rings again) Burglar! (woman appears at other side of door)
Woman: Yes?
Salesman: Burglar, madam.
Woman: What do you want?
Salesman: I want to come in and steal a few things, madam.
Woman: Are you an encyclopedia salesman?
Salesman: No madam, I'm a burglar, I burgle people.
Woman: I think you're an encyclopedia salesman.
Salesman: Oh I'm not, open the door, let me in please.
Woman: If I let you in you'll sell me encyclopedias.
Salesman: I won't, madam. I just want to come in and ransack the flat. Honestly.
Woman: Promise. No encyclopedias?
Salesman: None at all.
Woman: All right. (she opens door) You'd better come in then.
(Salesman enters through door.)
Salesman: Mind you I don't know whether you've really considered the advantages of owning a really fine set of modern encyclopedias...(he pockets valuable) You know, they can really do you wonders.
(Cut back to man at desk.)
Man: That man was a successful encyclopedia salesman. But not all encyclopedia salesmen are successful. Here is an unsuccessful encyclopedia salesman.
(Cut to very tall building; a body flies out of a high window and plummets. Cut back to man at desk.)
Man: Now here are two unsuccessful encyclopedia salesmen.
(Cut to a different tall building; two bodies fly out of a high window. Cut back to man at desk.)
Man: I think there's a lesson there for all of us.
C'mon, the worst they will get you for is plagurisim and it's more likely your peers will nail you before the Encyc people do.
There was something about being a kid and flipping through my parents Encyclopedia Americana during a rainy day, or a sunny one for that matter. I wouldn't mind having a printed set still, even as the information might be dated, I still like going through books. I can't imagine the industry for the printed books is doing very well anymore, aside from library sales.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
and blame them and their culture and values and families for destroying encyclopedia business. Lets ask government to tax internet heavily and provide subsidised paper to encyclopedia printers.
oh wait. we are not talking about outsourcing here! wrong thread.
I think I hear a new song by the Buggles!
doesn't any industry take responsibility for itself? If an industry doesn't change or grow with the times (or make those changes fast enough) they can be left to the side of the road...
Other media/technology went through changes brought upon by new technology/mediums... like radio with the advent of tv and now TV with the advent of the internet.
Encyclopedia salesman didn't peddle large volumes of books, they "sold" the books by letting parents believe little johnny would be all he could be if he just had an encyclopedia set! We need to be sold something on TV in an informercial or QVC to tell us it will make our kid smart now as we don't trust the door to door hucksters... but we do trust that re-assuring family in the hooked on phonics commercial...
*shrug* I surrender!
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
"sales for encyclopedia software fell 7.3 percent in 2003 from 2002"
sales falling? shouldn't we blame this on pirating of some sort?
Al Gore!!
I'd love to smash their skulls with Eminent Domain but promoting the general welfare does have some moral limits.
The Wikipedia guidelines explicetely say "Wikipedia wants generally accepted facts". We recently had a contributor who added a large number of crank theories into articles presenting them as facts. (For example - "Albert Einstien was an incorrible plaguarist who got all of his great ideas by plaguarizing the documents he had access to while he was a patent clerk"). Essentially, we'll take a certain amoung of fringe theory, as long as it is presented that way. The user in quesiton, by the way, was banned about 2 weeks later for persistent trolling - the entire community wanted his gone.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
An classic character in jokes has passed into the archaic: the door-to-door encyclopedia salesman.
"I forgot my mantra."
If you're feeling nostalgic, you could always grab a copy from Ebay.
Newer versions (2001ish) go for about $270 including shipping on Ebay. The newest version direct from World Book is $1100.
If you like learning random things, you should try out the Wikipedia random page feature.
My experience that weened me from using encyclopedias. It was 95 or 96 and my teacher for an international business class in college wanted us to do research on a country of our choise using only the Internet. This was a several day assignment, and part way through the first class I got called out by the teacher in front of the students because I was photoshopping game pieces for one of the civ games. Conversation went roughly like this:
Teacher. Onyxruby, are you done already?
Me. Yup
Teacher. Really? Just where did you get all information?
Me. CIA
Classroom. Laughter breaks out.
Teacher. Your telling me you got information from the CIA?
Me. That's what I just said.
Teacher. Care to share this treasure trove with the class.
Me. Sure.
Teacher gets back there expecting to see that I'm bullshitting her. I show her:
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/
Everything she wanted from per capita income to the number of tv's was in there. Look on her face went from sheer disbelief to righteous indignation as she started writing it on the white board for the whole class to read. I haven't looked back at encyclopedias since.
...nothing beats an encyclopaedia. With an encyclopaedia, you have in-depth, well-written information on just about *every* topic of human knowledge, up to date of publication. No, you don't want to read up on open source in it (yet), but if you're interested in just about anything historical, scientific, or cultural, you'll find no better general resource than an encyclopaedia. And while the cross-referencing is not nearly as convenient as a hyperlink, it's a lot more consistent and well done.
Grab a Britainica some time - I have a set from 1987 and it's still an outstanding reference.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
How to cite Wikipedia
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Wikipedia may be acceptable for a general, quick-and-dirty tidbit, but it lacks authoritative research and fact checking, and it is often biased and opinionated. And the weakest part of Wikipedia is that it relies far too much on common knowledge. Notice that the only articles that get regularly updated are those "of general interest". For in-depth research on any obscure topic, it is a very poor reference.
I know it's very fashionable to bash Friends, but the episode with Penn (From Penn & Teller) as the encyclpedia salesman was hysterical. Joey wanting to talk about "Vas Deferens," "Vietnam War" and "Mt. Vesuvious" was great!
Maybe if we locked up free information with copyright? Can you own a fact? if not you should be able to. Well to start with, the 'Fact' that this post is flamebait is now my IP! don't even think of modding me down or publishing this in anyway!
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
...penis enhancement industry is long gone. The encyclopedia business is sure to follow.
Quick How can the encylopedia companys blame this one the P2P networks!! Hurry up, we have people to sue!!
Slipping Away...
I haven't seen one since the 70's actually, well before the Internet was mainstream. I tend to think that their business model was out of touch before the mid-late 80's.
I used to think the transparencies of the Human Body were really cool, though.
Now, if only I could get rid of all the friggin' Kirby Salesmen that keep bugging me at all hours!!
If this article confuses you, don't worry. It was posted yesterday in a much clearer fashion.
Regarding Wikipedia and trust, the "page history" feature on the left can help. Not only will the page history protect you against recent vandalism (i.e. in case you see a damaged page before someone has a chance to correct it); a frequently edited page with many contributors may be more reliable than a page that had less peer review.
So when is the Encyclopedic Publishing Association of America going to begin issuing subpoenas???
So for the same money I bought my daughter a nice laptop with wireless.
A high-quality bound encyclopedia has many advantages, not the least of which is that you can open it anywhere and begin a fascinating journey through human knowledge. In comparison, Web space is vast but constrained, cluttered, and low-res.
I always thought that computers and Encyclopedia were a good mix. Heck it gave the kid a B on his report on Space.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
In addition to (2) being important for the internet, I think a valid consideration is how persistant is the information available online going to be in the future. servers are renamed, shut down, reorganized, and so on. Is it going to be commonplace for a person to archive their own versions of someone elses web site in the case that the site closes down? Wikipedia is very popular, if it shuts down in the future, what happens? All of that knowledge could be scattered. If an encyclopedia publishing company closes, the results are still tangible and available either at a library or elsewhere. Will libraries need or want to invest in authorized copies of websites for future reference?
I checked the Brittannica encyclopedia books here for what made the company lose so much money in print sales, but I couldn't find anything. Oh wait - here's the information, on the Internet. I shall learn more about this "Superhighway."
If you like learning random things, you should try out the Wikipedia random page feature.
Oh, I'm familiar with the random Wikipedia page. In fact, just trying out your link has delayed my post by at least five minutes, as I attempt to figure out the concept of Pentagonal numbers.
And I'm doing my best to create random articles of my own... that's not something I could do with my old World Books, since I was taught not to write in the margins...
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
It's funny that somebody pleading for reliability in scientific knowledge believes that Galileo's unpopular theory was that the earth was round.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Encarta is probably the best product Microsoft puts out.
It comes on a single DVD, has tons of content, is a good reference, and is available from Costco for $19 after rebate.
The only downside is that its not available for the Mac, although they used to make a Mac version about 5-6 years ago.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
That is true, and many articles suffer as a result of that. On the other hand, do you think Wikipedia would be as valuable, and have as many diverse and good articles (that far overwhelm the bad ones), if it made its editors jump through hoops?
Whole entire industries can't go obsolete! It must be because people are copying each others encyclopedias and trading them over the internet! There needs to be a watchdog lobby group, perhaps called the EIAA (Encyclopedia Industry Assoc. of America) which can address such concerns, so the owners of the intellectual property contained within encyclopedias see there cut.
The great thing about Encyclopedias is knowing that someone is vouching for those facts... When you find something through Google, you generally have no idea of the quality of that information. Site's like Wikipedia are a great alternative, where there is a system for peer review and correction, but in general Google is just not the same as an Encyclopedia. For kids to survive, they are going to have to be discerning and question every fact put before them. I think this is good in general, but I don't think our schools are teaching much critical thinking these days. They are going to need to start because there is a lot of misinformation out there.
In a time before the web, some encyclopoedia company trying to get custoemrs by selling their "A" volume for 4.95 and the rest for $80 each. My parents, being the skinflints they are, bought said volume for me and suggested I do my essays on aardvarks and such. In a bind, I actually would pick an "A" topic to write about, but normally I'd just use the school library's collection.
-no broken link
Wikipedia is wonderful, but the point you're missing is that the internet itself is the greatest encyclopaedia ever created.
Wikipadea is just a small, small part of the accretion of articles available to anyone with net access.
DAILY ROTATION
... grammar and spelling have not improved.
Representatives of the buggy whip trust expressed outrage over the newfangled automobiles that are choking our avenues and scaring untold numbers of horses.
It's hard to be a master of anything without a lot of memorization. If you don't have the core information in your head already, you're not qualified for most serious professions, though I admit that having online access to so much information does affect even the way a master will allocate his study time and effort.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Most encyclopedias today are moving to the internet in specialized form via universities that are professionally edited and peer reviewed. See the philosophy net encyclopedia plato.stanford.edu.
I'm sure there are many others for other disciplines so they can have a continually evolving centralized resource.
If you want to look something up today, find one of these reputable encyclopedias for the area you're interested in. The days of the Big Encyclopedia are done.
I am 33. When I was 10 or 11 my aunt gave me two sets of encyclopedias. One was the standard Britannica-type collection, probably 30 volumes or so. The other one was broken down into subjects.
Problem #1: Both encyclopedias were published in Spain, and we lived in Puerto Rico, which is a US Commonwealth, so most of the political and cultural slant of both was aimed at Europeans and made a lot of the content very confusing.
Problem #2: These things take a long time to put together. By the time it goes on sale most of the content is a couple years old. All the machinery, cars, airplanes, inventions, etc. looked already outdated.
Problem #3 was the size, but that was the early 80's so it was not the end of the world. Back then we were used to the idea of having to lookup an index while now we expect all information to be one GIS away.
Encyclopedias are terribly outdated and are competing with free information resources that are up to date and more reliable. They are expensive and they take a lot of space.
The one thing I miss about them is that (at least both of mine) had some really kickass layered diagrams of cool stuff like nuclear reactors, car engines, a submarine, etc. The diagrams were printed on clear plastic and as you leafed thru it you would go deeper into the workings of the machine. Now of course we can have something like a QTVR movie or a Flash animation to do much better, but for many years that was the only way to go.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
I'm not sure exactly how you'd define "young people," but it's been my experience that the fallability of internet resources has been one of the most common topics drilled into the heads of middle- and high-school students, at least in the past decade or so. When I was in middle and high school (not too many years ago), we had entire class periods dedicated to learning which sources are worthy of taking a look at, how to check for bias, and which sites aren't worth anything (read: anything from geocities, for example, or anything with little animated "Under Construction" gifs). Use of the internet was encouraged to be limited and mostly supplemental; use of periodical indexes (such as Jstor) was highly encouraged.
That's really where the power of the internet is, as you point out - in the specialized reference engines that are freely available to just about any college student and most high school students. For home use, there are other specialized reference engines depending on what you want to look up (www.mdconsult.com comes to mind for physicians). But remember, we're talking about general information here, not writing a thesis - usually you'd use an encyclopedia just to get an the basic idea of a topic, something that a quick google scan or a free online reference site can almost always accomplish.
Used to buy these every other year. Great big books on movies. Very well written. But for me, replaced by the IMDB.
"WikiPedia is a great idea, but the actual implementation is still very immature and it in now way compares to a good encyclopedia. "
Could you please elaborate on that?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
You also need checking that an entry reads well, makes sense, and is informative.
A few people have mentioned Wikipedia - my first experience of it came when someone on slashdot linked to an article in a comment a few weeks back.
It was an article about Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower. Not knowing what it was, but knowing Tesla was generally an interesting guy with some weird theories, I decided to have a look.
Go and have a look, and see if you can work out what the hell the Wardenclyffe Tower is, or what it is for. I was at least halfway through the article before I had much of a clue, and even then I don't think I was sure. That's just bad writing.
I love this part from the 3rd paragraph of the article:
Me: "Yeah, but you haven't told us what the function is yet!"
But publishers are not passive in front of that. At least several are embracing the web, trying to differenciate their service against the "background noise", and be sucessful in this kind of environment (at least for technical books, still have a big respect for O'Reilly, one can find more useful i.e. their cookbooks than blind google searching for some problems, and that in a field where google should be better)
Even better question - why does that last Kuro5hin link point to slashdot.org?
I've long since abandoned my cellulose encyclopedia collection for the information crack dealer known affectionately as Google. But when I was a kid, my favorite books were my collection of Encyclopedia Britannica. I used to spend hours following a thread from volume to volume, or just reading them straight through. It exposed me to a lot of diverse topics that I probably never would have come across by doing directed searches on Google. The information wasn't as current as whats available on the web, but it was much more complete and trustworthy. Also, I still don't think I absorb information from a CRT as easily as I do with a book.
:)
Parents should really consider postponing their child's computer training and let them spend a few quiet afternoons with books. Besides, I want my kids to see computers as a tool to get things done, and not an end unto themselves(lest I create one more slashdot reader).
And no, I don't sell encyclopedias.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
I wonder why the publishers didn't band together and prevent the use of Web server software, widespread use of the IP protocol?
They could have said: "If you do not buy an encyclopedia the publishing industry will be ruined. Besides, free information is "unamerican".
Did you know that using a web browser is illegal?
Sort of brings such things to mind when I compare the music publishing industry with the print media industry, which by all accounts is still doing well.
The legal tactics the RIAA is using is something they as publishers of Encyclopedias could have used, in the early times of the web.
But, they got smart these publishers, and decided to reshape the product and build interactive educational CD's.
Also, they lowered the prices on the materials as well.
Anyone see the same possibilities that the RIAA currently uses to keep an old archaic system from dieing, that the publishing industry could have employed to keep encyclopedias in print?
-Hackus
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Immediate action must be taken!!!
M$ may be entitled a slice of the CDROM Piracy tax.
I agree. I was contacted to block a website through our school district web filter.
www.martinlutherking.org
It's purely a hate/descrimination web site and the domain name is owned by a known white supremacist organization. But the kids that find sites like these view them as if they are fact! Kids don't do a whois search. It doesn't even enter into their minds that someone would post misleading and false information on the web. A simple Google search turns up all sorts of "information" that points to this "factual" website.
Part of me needs to block it, but kids need to see this stuff too, otherwise they'll leave school and suddenly vast swaths of the web are now "unhidden" and they won't know what to believe. Maybe I don't give kids enough credit, but it's a troubling thought that our censorship of the web might be doing more harm in the long run, and I'm a part of that.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
I'd love it if Google and the Web were able to produce comprehensive survey articles and concise in-depth analysis. But, as much as is out there, and as good as some of it is, it's not yet a replacement for much of dead tree literature.
Just searching the indeces on SciSearch for articles gives a lot more references in technical areas than just searching what's been put on the web so far (what, maybe 20-50% of what's been produced between 1992-2004?).
Unfortunately, copyright restrictions will prevent my ultimate dream from being realized: having everything that has been published put on-line and indexed and freely searched and accessed. I mean things like Lord Kelvin's papers, the collected notebooks of Ramanujan, the latest edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, etc.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I don't think I phrased that terribly well - to clarify, I meant that I *would* trust Wikipedia more than the average Google result. I often run searches with 'site:wikipedia.org' appended. That said, I think I would trust it less than a published encyclopaedia; one of the issues I have with Wikipedia is the lack of author attribution. You've only got handles, and even then it's not easy to tell who wrote what. Britannica by contrast has attributed articles from many people eminent in their relative fields. The fact that it's such a fluid work also makes it difficult to cite (although you can reference specific revisions from the history page.) That's the nature of the beast, I know, it's a collaborative work. And it does work, for the most part, for what it is - a general encylopaedia. Traditionally, however, we tend to like to pin specific writings down to specific people. Each new piece of writing does not appear in a vacuum, but is from a known person. Even a site like Slashdot encourages from a registered account, and people take into account posting history, etc.
Nowhere near as good as Wikipedia - E2 doesn't take itself seriously enough the be an encyclopedia, but takes itself too seriously to be "Everything."
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
A friend would like to buy a set of Enclyclopeadia Britannic. Does anyone know if they are available?
Have you ever actually tried to just purchase a set? I know when I was growing up my mother spent many a year trying to buy a set for me. We finally were able to buy a set of World Book encyclopedias, but only because they'd actually sell them to us. At the time Britannica refused to just give my Mom a price. She called, she begged, she pleaded. They always insisted on talking about their loan plans, and would never simply name a price on how much the whole set would cost so she could write a check.
:) I know that personally I think a home deserves a good set of them to make it livable, but if it's too hard to just get you to sell them to me, then it ain't going to happen. You should work for my money, I shouldn't have to work to give it to you ;)
The internet while perhaps not as a reliable source of information, at least rarely turns away my good hard earned money when I'm willing to spend it.
Not sure if the sales tactics have changed, but if they haven't, then they might think about just posting a price for a full bound set, and taking credit cards
If kids aren't reading encylopedias anymore, I don't think I'll be going to Encylopedia Brown for advice. If he's getting his information of the internet how can I trust his insight when it comes to the "Case of the Missing Jobs"
It was those damn commercials a few years back... The ones with the gawky, squeaky-voiced kid with the glasses who had the report on space and bickered with the voice-over. I STILL want to punch him.
Advice, like what? Proper wanking technique?
> So there's really no way to prevent somebody's kid from somehow managing to confuse neo-nazi websites for reliable sources while writing a paper about Hitler.
There are a whole slew of data weighing techniques that are suitable for teaching from lower primary school. They weren't being taught last time I was in the Primary Ed system (Australia, 5 years ago) but I don't know about now. Generally these things start being slipped into individual class curriculums by the conscientious teachers long before they end up in the formal syllabus.
These skills are VERY important for the correct function of democracy, so there is some pressure from modern western governments to keep them out of the schools (cite attempted modifications to Queensland's social studies curriculum circa late 1990's to stop the correction of the 'wasted vote' myth that assists the major parties in dominating elections).
The man with no surname and a silly hat
On the universe: It's bunk.
Just spent 2 weeks looking for an encyclopedia for my 8 year old son. Why? Because the software versions were too much like video games (not enough time spent reading the information) and the web versions were way to clutsy for a 56k connection (which is the best I can expect...ever)
When I was eight (snowed in July, walked up-hill to school both ways, etc.), my parents invested (sacrificed) for an encyclopedia that I could sit in my bed at night, before I went to sleep, and **READ**. I would fall asleep to images of bats or lizards or computers or stalin or lincoln or whatever trapped my fancy at that time.
Why can't Brittanica or Encarta or even Google (whose e-encyclopedia I just purchased) come up with a multi-volume product that will capture the hearts and minds and **imagination** of young people while providing updated information on the web?
To this day, I blame my know-it-all knowledge to the fact that I read an encyclopedia from cover to cover when I was bored one summer! And, guess what? I was the first in my family to go to college, get a degree, teach, keep my teeth, yada, yada, yada...
Whatever 'safe-for-work' means. I guess that depends on where you work.
Should it also exclude cuss words, naughty bits, and dangerous ideas?
I know a number of people that have worked at Brittanica over the years, and the stories I've heard come out of that place are unbelievable.
"Owning" perhaps the greatest body of encyclopaedic content at one point and:
1. Refusing to come up with a CD-ROM strategy, for fear of cannibalizing book sales. Encarta comes along and eats their lunch.
2. Refusing to come up with a web strategy for many of the same reasons. The Internet itself eats their lunch.
3. In their defense, they did eventually try to come up with a number of ways to sell/license/share the content, but they were unwieldy and involved dividing the information into about 9 different online/CD/library/educational properties (I'm not kidding). Even their developers could hardly keep them straight.
4. Along the way, they came up with a crazy homegrown network to deal with global access, user profiles, and content updates. From what I heard, it was cutting edge, but it essentially was an attempt to "Akamai" the content in-house. After spending many, many millions of dollars, they outsourced the hosting and management after all.
5. One of the early "Jedi masters" of Search Engine Optimization spent considerable time and effort advising them on how to optimize their site. They made this a back-burner job for about a year, and eventually declined to execute it. Had they executed this correctly, today the entire body of content would be well-googled and highly ranked, giving them traffic potential revenue streams (if they hadn't eventually just closed ranks and made the whole thing a pay site, of course.)
6. Instead, they spent their time and money on things like this: paying $150k per month for a tiny text link on lycos' home page. I know a bunch of companies blew money on things like this (usually with AOL extracting the cash) but they were literally re-strategizing several times a year, and throwing out millions of dollars worth of development hours.
With all that said, it's really too bad, because I found that the developers and some editors are among the most brilliant people I've encountered. For the most part, they had educations of a completely different caliber (MIT, Oxford, Carnegie-Mellon, etc.) but were surprisingly down-to-earth, not name-dropping their Universities in the first 12 seconds of your conversation, for example.
Sadly, the management did not fit that mold. Privileged, self-righteous, cocky, arrogant PHBs. Piss away $millions a year on aforementioned goose chases and blame it on everyone else. I think the only reason it went on like this (and still does) is because the entire operation is owned by an 85-year-old Swiss billionaire who really doesn't seem to care about it, and the executive team keeps him in the dark.
It doesn't surprise me at all to see it all dying, considering this was once one of the premier brands of the medium.
Our library shells out big bucks for web access to some databases and journals.
In this, non-porn searches are similar to porn searches: the good stuff costs. (Not that I'd know anything about this, of course!) Lexus/Nexus search, anyone?
This was another intangible value provided by a print encyclopedia. Right or wrong, it was perceived that the authority of a reputable publisher was behind each article.
Unlike the web, where any idiot (or ideologue) can self-publish. (This post being a case in point). Makes it very difficult to authenticate "valid" information.
I mean seriously, the knowledge was always too general or out-of-date to be of use even before the internet unless you were writing a high school report on what Rwanda is like or something. I say good riddance.
Anyone remember that long-blonde-haired teenage encyclopedia pitch guy in the late 80's? He was even more annoying than the Dell dude.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Just as Wikipedia is undoing the encyclopedia industry with a high-quality, free product, so Wikibooks ( http://wikibooks.org ) is set to do to the textbook industry.
Wikipedia is a great place to find out the current popular interpretations of history and other subjects. They've done a great job at SEO and are likely to become the most influential single source of information on the net on most topics. I notice Wikipedia shows up on the first page for most of my internet searches these days. It is a bit scary having one source that is that influential.
Of course, one of the great things about Wikipedia is that you can read the editing history of the items, and see the political battles raging as different groups try to promote their versions of history.
As for the rest of the net. The majority of pages are opinion pieces. Since the search engines judge sites by link popularity, provocative opinion pieces often get a better billing than factual pieces--more people link to provocative sites than to facts.
The good thing about the old encyclopedias is that it is easy to guess the publishers point of view, making it easier to filter the facts from intepretation.
The first book I ever read, cover to cover, was "A", from World Book.
As I recall, I then skipped to "R" for Rockets.
Above comment is personal opinion. Poster is not a spokesperson.
Yes, it was rather funny when I bought my set of Britannica.
I made three mjor steps when I came into this city (1) I found a woman and married her (2) she found a house and we bought it and (3) I tracked down an encyclopeadia salesman and bought a set.
Well - #3 was the hardest. I managed to find them but had to call long distance as I recall. Eventually this lead to a referal here in the city and a younge chap showed up at the door. He advised that he had to go through his speal. I advised I wasn't interested in his speal - I wanted to look at the covers and the color.
A few minutes later his jaw drops in AMASMENT and he askes "Do you mean you are really going to buy them?" to which I answered: "Well, if you ever show me the damn covers - yes!"
And he says something like: "The company says I always have to go through this speal... This is the EASIEST sale I've ever made!!!"
They only cost about 1 1/2 months salary. I still look at that set with pride. And they are used alot as well. Of all the investments I've made, my encyclopeadias are one of the best.
I didn't know they had all the links to ALL of the shocker sites i've ever heard of! DISGUSTING! UGH!
JUST SICK!
i would have used a world almanac. Published yearly, every library has probably a dozen copies since they're just 1 cheap volume.
most economics magazines publish a summary of the world each year... really, getting economic information from an encyclopedia is just lazy.
-
I wish I had a peer-reviewed BS detector.
So while the part about the current state of the soviet economy might be useless, the part about the founding history of the soviet union would not.
-
Years ago, (circa 1990) we had one of the salesman drop by to deliver our "free" Marriam Webster dictionary. He was selling $3000 ecyclopedia sets. I asked him for a CD version but he was intent on selling a shelf full of books that would be obsolete in a year (or less).
As opposed to a CD which will magically update itself every year (or less).
It seems other people had been asking for the same thing.
CDs that magically updated themselves every year?
He really became quite agitated about me insisting on a subscription based CD version and stormed off.
Maybe you should have taken the hint the first time he said he didn't offer a CD version and not been such a prick.
No $3000 sale of rotting books,
Rotting books that will last 150 years if well cared for as opposed to 30 years in an absolute best case scenario for the CD (much less considering the proprietary executable on the CD which will only run on a certain version of a particular OS).
Companies that do not listen to their potential customers deserve whatever fate they create for themselves.
They're listening to you, it's just that they're too busy laughing their balls off at your stupid ass to satisfy you with a new product.
I imagine that if they were to take the material that they already had on computer and market it through CD's and then later through DVD's they would still have a booming business.
Speak of the devil, and it's only $69.95. You sir are a genius.
I nominate you for Slavish Technology Worshipping Jacknuts of the Year.
...small to niche businesses are, per employee, orders of magnitude better for the economy than big business. Of course small businesses can't payrole a politician to support that.
For example, Australian logging companies twist the political 'job-loss' arm every time there is a threat that a forest won't be opened up for bulk-chipping. They neglect to mention that for every job they create, five were lost from the boutique timber industry (making long-term usable furnature, rather than newsprint/chip-wrapper/landfill) who loose their rights to selectively fell when the chippers move in the bulk machinery.
The man with no surname and a silly hat
On the universe: It's bunk.
I guess we know where the lawyers for the RIAA, MPAA, etc. will be looking for business next.
The 1911 Britannica is online here: http://1911encyclopedia.org/ For recent information, magazines are best. But for issues like the origin of concepts, or ideas, the 1911 is unbeatable, still. The Online version appears to been run through a scanner, with the technical problems that come with scanning a typeset document. I have not found out how to help the site with proofreading.
I'm one of the contributors to the Esperanto Wikipedia. One thing that I have seen is that there are a number of people who scan the list of latest changes. I know I do it. Most of the time, we make minor corrections to typos, but I've certainly been taken to task for more serious mistakes.
This article discussed some of the questions concerning articles on the Wikipedia. It pointed out exactly the behavior I have described, along with other factors. Aside from the stated requirement of a neutral tone, it turns out that a neutral tone is self-enforcing. The only way you can get an article to stand up to repeated editing is to make you points in a way that your fellow contributors can accept.
This can certainly result in criticisms and praise getting watered down a bit. But it actually has some side-effects that are obvious after you consider them. For example, because the Esperanto Wikipedia is not tied strongly to any particular country, there is a concerted effort to make geographical references neutral. References to Southeast Asia are neutral. References to the Far East aren't.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
falling a few percentages in one year, a year of struggling economy, doesn't make a trend in my opinion. I'd like to see a study of sales from '90-'95, '95-'00, and from '90-'04.
Actually, the intangible value of an encyclopedia is not really related to it being print. There have always been bizare books published that are most certainly disconnected from reality. Mein Kampf is a good example there.
The value that the encyclopedias had was the name. You trusted that Encyclopedia Brittanica (or the World Book or any other one, for that matter) would be generally accurate because nobody had any major complaints.
Russia always maintained a death grip on their encyclopedias before Communism kicked the bucket.
The problem was, I'd almost think that the world of encyclopedias was getting chipped away when MS Encarta and the other "multimedia" encyclopedias, which were entertainment disguized as reference, came out.
Gentoo Sucks
It is true that in high school and college you are told what are reliable sources. But something interesting...most of the "reliable" sources (for a college anyway) are PAY services. They can't afford to have customers running away, so the librarians tell you these sites are the best.
Vote for global prefs bug
I shall blame my error on slashdot.
I was forced to retype the post after the server was unresponsive to my first submission attempt.
IHBT IHPL IWHAND
I don't get it.
...but that doesn't mean that they can spell, construct a grammatical sentence, or logically and coherently advance an argument. My experience was teaching undergraduate level in Ireland. I wasn't teaching English, but found that most of my efforts in correcting papers had to be directed towards fixing these elements.
I'm not still teaching myself, but I've heard a lot to suggest that the upsurge of the internet has exacerbated problems which were only starting to appear in my day. My girlfriend teaches final year school as well as third level, and besides the plagarism issue, many of her students just can't get it into their heads why a random page on the internet should not be given as much weight as an expert in the field. She has gone over it with them, but they are lazy - they want to use the internet exclusively for research as it's easy, whereas going to the library is too much effort.
Part of the problem is that here (in my experience- in the humanities), any half-serious research methodology classes only appear at the postgraduate level. It might be touched on slightly earlier in certain subjects such as history, if you chose a manuscripts option. I agree as to the importance: at a minimum it should be the *first* thing taught in university, and preferably should be introduced even further back in the school system. Research methodology is the humanities is like 'planning' in programming, and it's insane that it just isn't emphasised early enough.
So the article was corrected 16 minutes after your edits. What if I came by in the first 15 minutes and used your misabbreviations in a report I was preparing for work? Then I'd be screwed, wouldn't I?
I'd have to be a fool to rely on Wikipedia for anything important. The way it is now, it's not an encyclopedia. It's nothing but an interesting social experiment.
Yeah, I'm an armchair critic.
...but I do not plan to give them unlimited access (or unlimited time to spend at a computer) at such an early age. I was not raised by a television and I sincerely hope that I can match my parents' succesess by not allowing my own children to be raised by a computer.
The internet has ruined truth. I don't know how many times in a week I get an e-mail from friends and others stating this and that.. To the average person that can't navigate around and find the TRUTH... the internet has become a cluster fsck of lies, half-truths, and etc...
So it's good from your point of view, but all to often someone that spouts how they 'looked it up' on google has no basis for the information they found.
The idea of a free, online encyclopedia was one whose time had come. The FSF made an announcement of the GNUpedia, but eventually endorsed the Wikipedia. Reading some of Richard Stallman's thoughts in the announcement gives some good ideas about how to make the project work.
ibiblio has started a project recently called Wikinfo. They have a very similar look to the Wikipedia and even link to it for articles they don't have, but they have adopted a different editorial policy. Specifically, they have chosen to use a sympathetic point of view.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Maybe every home doesn't need its own set of encyclopedias anymore. The Internet has pretty much taken over that niche, and even without the 'net CD-ROM encyclopedias (real ones, not info-tainment like Encarta) were on their way there.
But there's still a large market for hardbound encyclopedias: libraries. Any reference room worth a lick MUST have at least one, preferably more, general-purpose encyclopedia sets, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
There are about 55,000 zip codes in the United States. Assuming each of these has one public library branch, and each branch orders a new set of encylopedias only every five years, at let's say $4000 a pop, that's about $44 million in revenue per year. Is that enough to run an encyclopedia publishing company on?
..."F - Copied from http://www...." on an assignment! Their idea that I can't find something on the web ten times faster than them never fails to amaze me!
Step 1) think assignment is fishy (very easy for an experienced teacher)
Step 2) search for a quoted sentence from the assignment
Step 3) fail assignment.
Works 9 times out of 10. Cpoies from paper sources are MUCH harder to trace. Student access to the web makes life SO much easier for teachers too!
The man with no surname and a silly hat
On the universe: It's bunk.
Grrr. The Web didn't ruin the encyclopaedia business. The enclyclopaedia companies didn't adjust for the changing market conditions and technology advances.
Saying the web ruined something makes the Encyclopaedia companies appear to be the hapless victims of tehcnological aggression.
So, tell the pointed headed encyclical editors to "giddy-up" and get with the times. Obviously the market has moved AWAY from them not because of some devilish scheme from Tim Burners-Lee but because what they have to offer in the way they are offering it (and I refer to the on-line, CD and paper editions) is just not needed/desired as much as in previous years.
The biggest problem with the Encyclopaedia Companies is that they saw themselves as Encyclopaedia Companies and not information dispensers. If they saw their task on a deeper level than thick leather-bound volumes (i.e., content-focused not package-focused) they would have been on the forefront of the evolution of information cataloguing, referencing, and accessing via the WWW versus being plummeled by the shifting times.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I paid around 50 bucks for the 2003 version of the Reference Library edition and I'm so glad I did.
I normally look for information on the web before resorting to Encarta, but when it comes to geography, I just love to play with Encarta's Atlas.
It includes many feature I'll never use, but there are two features (besides the encyclopedia) that I find very useful:
The Atlas's database is huge, and it's very easy to use, and visually stunning. It has a lot of highly interesting statistical maps.
In my personal case as an non-native English speaker I use the built-in dictionary which is always loaded in memory and has audible pronunciation for most words. It also has English translations (bidirectional) with Spanish, Italian, German and French. That's quite nice.
I don't tend to like MS products, but I must agree that Encarta is a very well made and very useful product. It is high quality software. Probably Britannica's articles is much better, but Encarta's Reference Library does the job very well.
Google Google Google Google Google Google Google Google Google Google Google Google...come on, who didn't see that coming? Well, the CD-ROM business really started the big decline, then the Internet finished it off. There are free encyclopedias online, but Google remains the best way if you've got a few more seconds.
Have YOU ever tried pressing flowers between two URLs?
The man with no surname and a silly hat
On the universe: It's bunk.
My wife and I were talking about buying some for our family. Our current set is about 25 years old, and yes some information is out of date, but a lot of information is still relevant, or provides a good background information to use as a lead for further research on the internet or someplace else.
One really nice thing about an encyclopedia is that it is a book, and not on computer screen so I find it more comfortable to read. Also you can see other unreleated topics nearby that sometimes are very interesting and worthy of a quick read even if they are off topic. I am not sure kids are getting much of that by looking up the exact answer and don't see anything else. Kinda of like going around with blinders on.
...is that you thought to yourself "that's sexy, I'm gonna whack off to this" while I thought "I bet he has a prolapsed rectum and cannot walk without shitting in his pants."
yes, I do like responding to my precious little trolls. bite me.
So I went to investigate, and it turns out they were selling both the hard bound encyclopedias as well as the CD's. When I asked how much the CD would cost, the answer floored me. It was over a thousand dollars. It was several hundred cheaper than the books, mind you, but still absolutely ridiculous, and I told the sales rep that they could not possible expect to sell very many CD's for that amount. For that price, people would be just as liable to spend a little more and get an attractively bound physical set.
I told him it would be a lot more reasonable to charge only a hundred dollars or so... but to ask for over a thousand dollars for a CD that isn't even vertical market software is absurd.
I told him I'd wait a couple of years for the price to drop below a couple of hundred dollars before buying one, and the salesman told me that they'd never drop the price that low. I just shook my head in disbelief and continued on my way.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
And sell it on ten DVD's. It could have an information comparative to about a ton of printed ecyclopaedia books.
There you are, staring at me again.
Ironically, when first reading the blurb i thought "$1400? Wow, that's a lot of money for an encyclopedia set." However when you pointed out that i'd pay as much for two and a half years of high speed internet access, it didn't seem like so much money anymore.
Most of the information in a new encyclopedia set will be accurate for far longer than two and a half years. How often do they find out new information about Alexander the Great? Especially that invalidates what we alreay think we know? Plus you get the whole fun of oppening it at random and seeing where you end up. I should really look into buying a set for myself.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Based on this experience, I've decided that it's FAR, FAR easier to work on a Wikipedia article than one that would go in a commerical encyclopedia. Not just because there's peer review without any institutionalization required(someone reviewing generally reviews the article itself and not the database info), but because the amount of research any one person has to do is minimal for most topics; if you know something, you put it in, else you leave it open for the next guy and mark the article a stub. Eventually someone comes along who knows the bits that are missing, and the article is completed with a minimum of tedium on everyone's part. The articles that nobody knows about, you can post bounties for, and eventually someone brave and passionate about the subject will take on the adventure of searching through dusty archives in the real world looking for the letters or documents that would give him material for an article. There's not really any commercial interest to spoil this picture, since it's all entirely voluntary.
Vandalization is less of a problem than one might think; if the article is simply turned into whitespace, you roll it back from the history, which covers 100 edits IIRC. If there's bad information, someone had to work hard to come up with it and put it there; it can't be done on a massive scale like other forms of Internet abuse, and it takes at most an equal amount of effort to give the bad information a place as a "minority viewpoint," and much less to just roll the page back. If rival factions fight over an entry, then either it gets hammered out over time into something acceptable to both sides, or it gets locked.
However, I admit that I still am hesitant to cite Wikipedia as a source, and turn to the library's Britannica for all my encylopedia citations and fact-checking, just because of that "you never know" tendency. It'll probably go away as the Wikipedia becomes better developed and respected. I know that the development of Internet citations took a similar path while I was in school. In middle school(the mid-to-late 90s), the Internet was still "new enough" that many teachers just banned citing from it outright. Later, by high school, they had developed lists of trusted sites to access. Now in college, I can feasably cite anything I want off the Net if I think it's trustable, but most of what I end up using are official documents in PDF format from some research or government group, because they all post them online these days. Wikipedia citations will probably follow in a year or three.
Care to site a source for that? It seems on face value likely, but per capita I suspect there are about as many candle sales now as there were in the past.
Candles are easy to make, when you live life like they did pre-light bulb, you could save a lot of money by making your own candles. Most farmers did for instance, thus lowering the total candle sales. (Though some make a few to sell)
Then you have lamps of other sorts. Various oil lamps have been known for years. Whale oil was a big industry for many years because of the need to fill lamps.
Don't forget the old "storm the castle where the monster is" torch, while while impractical for indoor use likely accounted for a few uses.
I'm intentionally ignoring the gas light, which is what the light bulb really replaced. Between natural gas from the ground, and coal gas (made by heating coal, basically producing carbon monoxide) many houses were plumbed for gas lights.
I don't claim to know how what sources people used for their lights. I suspect that between people making their own, and all the other sources of light, candles sales are not down a whole lot.
I completely agree. However, I would also add that print indexes still retain an enormous value. I've often discovered a thread while browsing in an index that was perfect for the task at hand--and something I might not have otherwise thought to consider.
You are right that all scientific fact is the result of consensus. But, it's not a consensus of public opinion. It's a consensus of the people who are knowledgeable in that area. If you have 1000 people and only 100 of them have PhDs in Physics, then even if the other 900 disagree, the opinions that matter are the opinions of those 100 physicists. Anyone who thinks this is unfair is free to get a PhD in Physics or a BS in Physics or even just work with other physicists for years. Once they do then their opinion will matter. This is what "peer reviewed" means. It doesn't mean reviewed by random people. It means it was reviewed by people knowledgeable in the relevant area.
I am cleaning out my grandmother's old house which I am getting ready to move from, and I found a set of encyclopedias from the year 1955. I am holding onto them, for they are a time capsule of facts and opinions from that point in time nearly 50 years ago. For knowledge of the way the world is today, they are pretty useless, but for knowledge of the way things were, and to get a sense on how the world has changed ... or stayed the same. For a student of History, Economics, Technology, or even Medicine, the old books can be a valuable reference in their own right, and can be entertaining and enlightening for others as well.
Historical references online tend to be fragmented, of uneven quality, and sometimes less than comprehensive as well. Another problem is that online resources are often ephemeral, while the books will quietly sit on my shelf until my nieces, nephews, their kids, or my own possible descendents clean out my house when my time on this rock is through. Perhaps they will get a kick out of reading the old books too, and decide to make a spot for them as well.
In my bedroom right now I have a nearly complete set of Encyclopedia Brittanica. It is something like 50 volumes. Its a few years old, but someone gave it to me for free, so I took it. I'm going to sell it this weekend at a garage sale, because I simply don't have room for it, and the information is outdated, and the good information is too difficult to look up. The Internet is not a decent replacement however. The information is too unreliable for quick reference. I suppose I will someday buy an encyclopedia on CD or DVD. I just remember that the free version of Encarta that came with my computer sucked.
~ The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
The trick is being sharp enough to know what's garbage and what's Information. Like if you want to know about Chimps, you can get the info from Jane Goodall direct, rather than some Editor at an Encyclopedia. If I want to Know about Something current, an encylopedia is outdated the moment it is written. Without My Internet I'm Pretty Smart. With it I AM AN ALL KNOWING BEING!!!!
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
A) Look nice
B)are a good training tool for kids
C) I finally have the cash flow to do so and I wanted a nice frelling set and not those crappy ones that I had to use when I was a kid Damnit!.
I also have a complete set of german one but they are quite old and they sit at the office, because they would be torn apart by those damnable kids.
if you want "No More Hiroshimas" then I say "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."
The problem with encylopedias I've seen, is that they don't play to the strengths they have.
Mainly, what I'd like to see is encyclopedias that have a large variety of extensive multimedia. One picture for each topic doesn't exactly cut it... If I could look up "Ferrarri" and find 30 minutes of video-clips, along with plenty of audio recordings, and really detailed information on the cars, I'd be happy to buy the CDs/DVDs, because it's not easy to find that information elsewhere. Unfortunately, digital encyclopedias just tend to be a digitized version of the physical encyclopedias, with an audio clip thrown in here and there.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
How could they not see this coming? It's right there in Volume 5.
-=sig=-
everything2 [everything2.org] is also excellent and offers some great insight and even advice.
That's like saying Slashdot is excellent and offers insight and even advice. While it's certainly true, I'd take the (especially legal) advice with a grain of salt!
I have discovered a truly marvelous
google will have a new service soon.
google encyclopedia....they look at the web and take the most comprehensive articles and give you those as a source for a serch term.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Wikipedia. I'm sure everybody knows about it by now, but it's a great source of information for just about anything you can imagine.
Your sig is a prime example of the challenges involved in relying on the Internet for information.
I've seen both that and the following:
The latter seems much more likely to me (and is the one on quote.wikipedia.org, ironically enough), but both are widespread on the Internet.
I finally found a citation at twainquotes.com, but that version of the quote waffles:
Now, is the quote literal, or did Mr. Clemens write one or the other, and the site isn't willing to assert which? I can't find any online copies of the book to satisfy my curiosity.
Could the Encyclopedia Brittanica answer this for me? Could I have gotten this far in my research this quickly without the Internet? Probably not. But the Internet is far from a panacea.
I have seen peers in my classes that seem to persume Internet as equivalent to education, or true information. In presentations, where multiple groups work on same topics, I have seen most students just plagarizing off the Internet sites, without considering the validity of the information. Sure, encyclopedias can be used in such ways, but they are more valid,throughly reviewed, well written -- all of the qualities which most Internet sources lack.
I think today's students need to know that Internet isn't a way to achieve understanding and critical thinking, it is just a tool.
-------
FM Clan
The sad news is how the existence of the Internet has diverted and undermined people's reference habits. Many libraries are in fact excellent Internet reference portals which provide cardholders with free access to an array of reference services which otherwise would be costly or impossible for one individual to subscribe to. The library I use (from a large U.S. city) offers an extensive amount of online resources, including Encyclopedia Britannica, the Oxford English Dictionary, an exhaustive list of magazine, newpaper, and other periodical references, and much more. But how many people use this? How many people even value its existence? People are used to the limited ways they know to access the Internet and grow accustomed to their sloppy ways of accessing information. Libraries aren't out there competing for online businesses and their sites don't have lots of glitter.
But more and more whenever I have a chance to set up people's computers I set the local public library's website as their browser's homepage.
$7 for Britannica 2002 the other week at Half Price Books.
Runs well on Win95 via win4lin on RedHat -- which is pretty cool actually that they kept it that vanilla.
The sad truth is that technology changes too fast now. Almost monthly there are new discoveries, innovations, and products on the market that would make an encyclopedia out of date. Even on Discovery Channel, the reality TV medical documentaries now have a disclaimer "All medical procedures were current at the time of filming".
Looking at the old children's encyclopedias and you will see that many of the diagrams were simply hand drawn/annotated. Surfing the web and you will find any number of Powerpoint presentations, PDF files and MPEG movies of animations, CAT scans, X-rays, computer animations. There really isn't any way a single web site or even paper publication could compete.
The only market I could see would be for up to date indexing (ie. An intelligent Google which separated links into higher level concepts (eg. Google Mathematics, Google Cooking) so when you look for a pie slice, you don't get a statistics page, when you're looking for a cooking recipe and vice versa.
The best thing any kid could learn is to not accept everything they read or hear as fact. Blocking this site is a disservice to that end. The site is deceptive and wrong, but then again so is Dateline NBC (just to a lesser degree). What if a teacher wanted to teach about propoganda? Strangely all the propoganda sites are blocked! The world is full of lies, and trying to block out the more obvious ones is just another form of deception.
AccountKiller
You can find more porn on the internet than in an encyclopedia. No longer do 12 year old boys (and those that act like them) have to hide in some dark, secluded corner of the libarary with key encyclopedia volumes and issues of National Geographic.
Actually, what you say is not entirely true.
Scientists can and do close their mind before all the facts are in (after all, they are people too). For example, I believe this applies to "cold fusion", there has been a considerable amount of research into cold fusion since it was discredited by mainstream science, but some very good science seems to say that nonetheless, cold fusion is real. It may never be econmically viable, it may even be misnamed, etc. but science closed ranks and said it did not exist, despite some good evidence that it could exist.
For a less politically charged viewpoint, look at some of the earlier scientific controversies, old school scientist often hold too their orthodox views well after the point it is supported by the evidence.
The problem is, your average teacher may not be prepared to deal with that sort of thing.
Especially if they are trying to view the web as a sort of high speed collision between pen-pals, a literature search engine, half of the library, and an encyclopedia. Before the Internet came along, they were carefully scrutinizing all of the available information sources for kids, figuring that they could be taught later on how to scrutinize the source. Now, you need to teach kids to be skeptical from the beginning.
Gentoo Sucks
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
In other news, how the automobile industry ruined the wooden axle and yoke buisness. Things become outdated, they are replaced with a better system as technology becomes avaliable. It's the Darwinian nature of technology.
Yep. Back when I had AOL and a 14.4 dialup connection, I used Encarta. Now, I have broadband. The internet is no longer a pain to use, taking forever to load anything, and thus find the information you are looking for. Now the internet is convenient, so people have no use for encyclopaedias. Not to mention the additional bonus of being able to search the text electronically.
/usr/games/fortune
Last time was probably in 10th grade, when they required that we use at least one book source, and four credible book sources in our english research papers. The last time I did an entire research paper using non-web/computer resources was in 3rd grade or so (circa 1992). Our school's library got encarta in 93 or 94.
moox. for a new generation.
The average teacher will have to learn how to deal with that fairly quickly. There's simply no way to block out all the bad sources of information, or even come close.
Either you use the 'net as a source of information and teach kids how to discern good sources from bad, or you give up on the internet entirely. There's no trying to "fix" the internet. You could do some form of whitelisting and only allow access to an approved list, but that's basically the same thing as discerning good information from bad. It also turns the internet into a small series of electronic books.
Personally I think forcing kids to scrutinize early on is the best thing that can happen to education. The pass the buck till later phenomenon goes on until College, and even then it often never gets addressed. You then wind up with people watching Fox specials on "Was the moon landing faked?" and believing it.
AccountKiller
So, the net got rid of paying for info on paper.
Could we ever see it git rid of paying for electronic information?
Will Google or some search engines ever create an "Oraganized factual" area that does the equiv of Lexis Nexis.
This will be very interesting over the next 20 years.
Most software geeks don't need or use Lexis Nexis, however, if you've ever supported a large legal office, you know all about it, and how expensive it is.
Homeschooling doesn't mean isolating or cloistering your child. Homeschooling parents often have their kids engaged in more social activities than the average public schooler.
Socialization isn't nuetral. There's bad socialization and good socialization. The least qualified people to teach a young child good social skills are their agemates. The peer dependency that kids often get from institutional elementary schools is more a handicap than a social skill. Kids who are educated by their parents until at least age eight tend to have fewer behavioral problems and are more likely to become self-directed social leaders.
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
Oh, I have no argument with you there - I was simply pointing out that in many places there's a strong effort being made to educate the students about such issues. On a side note, it's almost easier to detect internet plagiarism (I would think and have heard from some teachers) these days. Aside from noticing the often obvious stylistic differences, some of my teachers as early as middle school were using google and more advanced products (IIRC, I think EVE2 was a common one) to find those plagiarized papers as easily as the students did. On the flip side of the coin, I had one English teacher who plagiarized everything she claimed to have written. Google came to our rescue; she's currently on 'hiatus'. But yes, even here at one of the more "elite" northeastern small liberal arts colleges, I'm constantly amazed by the writing skills - or more appropriately, the lack thereof - of the students, especially in such fundamental areas as you've mentioned. It seems that basic writing skills have nothing to do with getting into a decent college. I spent most of my freshman year editing papers that mixed up "there", "their", and "they're," for instance, from students wouldn't know where to put a semicolon if their life depended on it. It's a pity. Or, as some would say, "Its a pity".
Most of the "reliable" sources are also just full-text indexes of known journals, at least around here - the content isn't coming from the service, just indexed by them.
My motivation for home schooling would be that I disagree with the curriculum of public schools and the bureaucracy of standardized testing. However, I also worry about friends and socialization. This is probably a common dillema.
I was homeschooled just after gradeschool until college, and my youngest sister was homeschooled all her life until college. We are all well past college now (in fact I am about twelve years past college) and I feel I was better socialized than a lot of other kids I knew.
I was able to interact with a number of kids of course, because kids play with kids - homeschooling does not mean you lock your kids in a basement for twelve years. But I also got a greater degree of interacting with other adults in the course of homeschooling (greater number of field trips, or interactions with other families), and that in turn led to a more mature understanding of how to interact with people that has served me well all my life.
Using school to "socialize" kids is about as good an idea as using TV as a proxy for attention. Usually it's more like you need to make sure you spend a bit of time deprogramming them. What is highschool but a world of really inefficient cults?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Wikipedia gets around this by attempting to be a "impartial snapshot of people's opinions". That is, display both consensus and unusual/crank opinions, without ridicule, but marked accordingly.
So for example the "NASA faked the moon landings" folks get a page, which details their arguments fairly, but also details the counter-arguments. The conensus moon landings page links to the hoax page as an "alternative view".
Of course, if you want *accurate* and *authoritative* information, rather than something any middle-schooler can toss together, you still have to subscribe.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
We, as a society, have come to place bound books dear(or maybe we always have, couldnt tell you). A book gives a certain amount of permanance that can withstand many lifetimes if properly bound and cared for.
I witnessed a book burning once. No, not a single book cought aflame, but a congregation of peoples activly donating books to a book fueled bonfire. Some church think I guess. I moved along with my disgust in tow. I dont know what the books were, they could have even been Ann Rice novels for all I really know about it, but it made me feel dirty just the same.
I am thinking that it is this sort of reverence that causes us to care at all about the encyclopedia business. We are just sad to see it go. But go it will.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Another truth of the matter is. Once you have ...say...the 2003 edition of encarta..do you really want the 2004??
The Aardvark section(in any encyclopedia) in 2003 would still have the same information about it compared to an 1980 edition of an encyclopedia....since they(Aardvarks) haven't changed in quite a few years...well the last time i talked to one anyways.
Aardvarks used as an example only. i mean nothing against them personally.
Also have you considered library memberships??
Maybe more people are realising that there are encyclopedias and other books you can use (for free in some places) to help your research.
Dude where's my Sig?
In Georgia we have GALILEO, which is for any student in Georgia or anyone with a library card in a public library.
Not to many people seem to know about it, but when you can find something on it, it works great.
At a local library sale I noticed some Encyclopedia Brittanicas here and there, and managed to collect the whole set (1969). When I asked them how much they wanted for the 24 volumes, they had no idea, and settled for 50 cents a volume.
You'd be surprised how many articles are still "up to date". And the '69 Britannica still had a lot of the older articles by quite famous scientists. The article on electro-magnetism is highly impressive, and the one on the history and nature of mathematical logic is written by Alonzo Church! (I understand newer Britannicas have dumbed down considerably, which is a shame.)
Anyway, I think they are well worth their 5 feet of shelf space and $12 CDN.
but it gave new life to the pr0n industry! especially the schiesse video industry. MP4 was invented for poop flicks.
This
IMHO, encyclopedia books and software are both static. Thus by today's standards are out of date very quickly. At least some encyclopedia software can be updated via the web. Even still, things change so fast that internet searches are really the easiest way to find the most up to date information you're looking for.
I tend to put newspapers in the same group. Why look at day old news when you can get up to the minute news at cnn.com or google or a plethora of other sites. I would much prefer looking at the website of my local news affiliate and taking what news I am interested in then and there than have to wade through a paper with all those continued on page n articles or listen through an entire boring newscast to get at the one piece of interesting news for the day. my $.02
...quicker, easier, more seductive the darkside is...but more powerful, it is not.
But how long will it take for something like the Chewbacca Defense to make it into Encarta?
Wikipedia rules!!
Google is used to find pages that mention topics. The listings returned have very little relevance to the reliability of the content.
If kids must be taught anything about web searching they must first be aware of that fact.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
It's still awfully late, but a class in how to do research is (or at least was) mandatory at the first 2-year college I attended, Cabrillo College in Soquel, CA. However, I now attend Yuba College in Marysville, CA and they have no such requirement.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
My beef with webpages over written/printed material, is that when you create a paper and need to cite a fact/figure you can reference a book/written document for date/page/issue# paragraph/section etc.. But on a webpage (which may be dynamically generated etc..) the information may not be there the next day or they may relayout the page. You can exactly say i got it from google.com by searching for "per capita income in 1970 for the united states".
2 months later, when they never came to pick them up, I threw them out.
No offense, but paper books have value, even if only as relics of a bygone age. But to think that you threw out a set of encyclopedias breaks my heart. Okay, so much of the information would be hopelessly out of date (geography, for certain), but there's still a LOT of useful info in even a 20-year-old encyclopedia, and it's criminal that you just threw it out. Didn't you at least think about donating to the Salvation Army or Goodwill?
When I was a kid, my parents bought two sets of paper encyclopedias (one for grownups and one for kids). I read the kiddie one until I got to about 7th grade and needed the better info in the grownup set. Keep in mind that by the time I graduated high school, those encyclopedias were already 15 years old, and by the time my youngest brother graduated, they were almost 30 years old, but they STILL HAD SOME VALUE.
Clearly, you never thumbed through encyclopedias at random when you were a kid and stopped to read about tornadoes or the social life of ants. I want my kids to have that enjoyment, and I'm personally looking for a set of paper encyclopedias to share with my kids. Sure, we'll Google the Internet for current info on any topic they need to research, but nothing beats lying down on the floor and opening a random volume of the encyclopedia to a random page and reading something fascinating about the history of dogs.
Digital encycopedia sales are down for one very obvious reason: people don't need another encyclopedia. Just as someone doesn't throw away their 1400$ encyclopedia set, they don't just throw away Encarta 2001 because it's a couple years old. It still works.
There simply isn't that much new information created in a given year or group of years, and what does happen is generally quite easy to find online for the first couple years after its occurance in contemporary news form.
Even small to medium sized libraries aren't likely to buy a new encyclopedia edition every year, 2 years, or whatever. My parents still have an enyclopedia set from sometime in the 1970's that is pertinent for a very vast amount of the information you might want to look up. Granted, some of the scientific information is a bit dated, as is the "history" that has occured in the last 25 years, but that's a relatively insignificant amount of time and knowledge.
I have a copy of Encarta from 1995 that is still more than capable of providing more information than Id likely need for a given topic given cursory interest, when and if I'm unable to find the info online.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
simple: you can't grep dead trees
Indeed! I've been thinking of a CDROM set but my laziness knows no bounds.
The web is also responsible for the decline of the
BBC and other Western "free" radio stations.
The web enables 3rd world countries and independent organizations to compete with the
likes of the BBC.
It makes it possible for anyone to dissemminate their version of the news without having the massive resources like relay stations all over the world.
Hence the success of Aljazeera and iraqwar.ru
Can't say I miss the BBC. Never believed them after the Malvinas war.
i wouldnt give a crap if that person got it wrong,
and in fact that person deserves it (one source for their info? what no cross referencing, they deserve the bad info)
Er, I wish I could see my errors when I preview, but no! Everything looks fine, for the record not was supposed to be note.
Little Brother, watching the watchers
Seriously, if you go by the actual SALES, (you know
some schmoe walks into a store and plunks
down exchangeable currency for a box with encarta in
it.) they're all about the same. Encarta just gets bundled
on a larger number of machines than anything else.
Btw... It sucks... the web is better. *sigh*
I always had trouble looking up topics in our encyclopedia set because - as I flipped past pages 293, 305, and 312 on the way to 331 - I would get distracted and start reading the items that caught my eye. I learned a lot, but it was a bit time-consuming when the report was due the next day. Oh, well - the challenges of childhood.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
"No doubt true?" It's an urban legend that it used to be generally believed that the Earth was flat. Eratosthenes successfully measured the circumference of the Earth around 200 BC. In medieval heraldry, only the Holy Roman Emperor could use the symbol of the "closed" or arching crown; everyone else had to use the "open" or pointy crown. This was because the Holy Roman Emperor's dominion was over the entire (spherical) world, which the dome symbolized. And persons living in seaports have always been able to see vessels coming up over the horizon. None of these were innovations in Galileo's time, and the idea of the spherical earth was hardly perceived as ridiculous or unacceptable.
I would also point out that Galileo died in 1642, a hundred and twenty years after Magellan's circumnavigatory expedition was completed!
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
In other related news, the EIAA [Encylopedia Industry Association of America] just announced it was suing the internet for copyright, trademark and patent infringement.
Jack Ahse, head of the EIAA commented "The internet represents unfair competition to our association members. It's been decided that rather than finding a way to compete in today's fast-changing technology, we're just going to sue."
EB let the market go-they really thought this was not IRL-now what does EB stand for again?
...but they have one critical flaw...transience. If the Internet develops a maturity where it can preserve valuable information then it might deserve to replace encyclopedias and books in general.
I remember in my childhood fondly looking through an encyclopedia from the 1930's,not because the information was necessarily the most useful because it wasn't current, but because it was a priceless snapshot of the era. It remains to be seen of the Internet will preserve this kind of snapshot of a time or will information always churn, so it is always current which is good for current research, but will it tend to develop some amnesia about the past. By this I don't mean it will lose the great works, because it wont, but will it preserve the smaller but still interesting details of each era.
The way back machine is a very noble effort at trying to preserve this kind of snapshot of the Internet but will it survive and build for 100's or 1000's of years like great books and libraries have?
Enlightened societies have fought hard to preserve books from destruction especially by onslaughts from violent and ignorant warrior cultures. The question is will we be both motivated and adept at preserving digital information. Books last 100's of years. Do we have digital storage media that will do the same or will have to rely on constant duplication of information to preserve it. It seems possible the Internet may preserve information intuitively because it tends to replicate and disperse useful information.
The other obvious problem with the Internet is it is causing an explostion in the volume of information which has to be filtered and preserved. Will the quality information lift its head above the sea of garbage when it comes time to preserve it. Google rankings tend to lift up the quality information but is that enough or do we need an army of editors to raise the valuable so it doesn't drown.
@de_machina
This is not actually a bad thing. This is how the whole internet thing is supposed to work. Changes have occured due to the new technology available to us today. Old, inferior business methods are falling quietly by the wayside. Some collectors will keep old encyclopaedia to show to the grandchildren. People have access to more knowledge more easily thanks to the wikipedia. Society and human culture take a small step forward.
Imagine if the same principles applied to the RIAA or SCO - you don't see these guys lying down quietly. What would things be like if Britannica cited their encyclopaedia as prior art for the internet, slapped down a patent on "method for storing and retrieving information by categorical reference in text and illustrated formats" and charged everyone $699 for using the internet? The RIAA should pay a little attention to World Book, Funk & Wagnells and Britannica. The RIAA is going down next, right?
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Not true. Those CDs had abridged versions, and sucked. Even 2CD versions didn:t hold the complete text. Why pay for something that isn't complete? Most likely I wouldn't find what I want and go to the library for the bound encyclopedias.
Sell a COMPLETE version, even w/o movies, interactive pictures, etc, and maybe someone woulda looked. Too late now tho.
As a reference it's virtually useless.
Anyone young enough to be fooled by this site for long probably shouldn't be surfing the Net without a guide. I think an average 5th grader would catch on to the bias before long. http://www.martinlutherking.org/
We're all very wise adults here and it's easy to wring our hands and worry about the poor naive children but they've all fucking grown up online. I'll bet the average grade school kid has a better bullshit detector than an average adult.
Further, the phrase, "we need to protect children," regardless of the intention usually ends up meaning, "we need to treat adults like children."
Well, I'm not questioning the factual accuracy of this statement, but rather its relevance. You presume that more pairs of eyes are always better than a carefully chosen 2-3 pairs of eyes. I don't think such a generalization holds.
In general, I find you Wikipedia people to be victims of an extreme form of naivete, which commonly affects OSS zealots: to think that good software/encyclopedia articles/whatever naturally comes out from having lots of people chip away at the same project in an uncoordinated manner. But that's just nonsense. The method, whevever applied strictly, doesn't produce a coherent result (and apparent counterexamples are only apparent; e.g. the Linux kernel isn't really a "bazaar", it's a reimplementation of an old design, with one guy who has absolute say over decisions).
I don't see that the Wikipedia model would be conducive to, e.g. radically altering the structure of an article to make data access better, simply because the model promotes incremental additions from a bunch of people who just will not be on the same page.
In short: too many cooks spoil the broth.
Are you adequate?
This is a myth. What counts as evidence and what does not is a consensual matter. New evidence never really falsifies any one empirical statement; as Quine argued so well, if a fact contrary to predictions comes up, there are endlessly many beliefs one could give up; which one is indeed given up is a consensual matter.
I'm not saying anything outrageous here. This has been generally accepted in history of science since the late 50's (e.g. Thomas Kuhn): that folk stories like the one you tell about how scientific knowledge moves on, however dear they may be to scientists, do not fit the actual reality at all when you look at how they work.
A key point, of course, is that when I talk about consensus, I mean consensus among scientists, not among the general public. That is, we have a social institution, Science, which invests certain people with the authority to tell us what we should regard as empirical truth. These people fight over it all the time, they do all sorts of backhanded shit to get better jobs and grants and stuff, to deny those to their competitors. They often lie outright, falsify data, etc. They write pop science books to appeal to a general audience that's unqualified to judge their work, and they fill these books with strawman attacks and misrepresentations of their adversaries. And so on.
Yet, somehow, it's still good enough that we manage to e.g. put satellites in orbit that retransmit events around the globe live.
Are you adequate?
There are very specific rules about protecting an article. It has to be done by someone uninvolved in the edit war. This helps enforce neutrality.
The only things an admin can do that a regular user cannot is protect a page, edit a protected page, or ban a user. Nothing is supposed to be done without "rough consensus" amoung participants. Polls are the most common way to do it. As admins, our votes don't count any more than anyone else's. In other words, the only thing limiting someone's "authority" is their willingness to participate.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I do not find it surprising that the internet is killing the encyclopedia. Kind of like I feel that the mega-bookstore (i.e. Barnes & Noble, maybe Borders) seems to be replacing the library. It seems easy for people to log on in their home and zoom around cyberspace looking for answers. But it makes me think of Caleb Carr's book "Killing Time." The novel, set in the not to distant future is about the power of the internet and the power of the information on it. Kind of like the classic line from "Wag the Dog," "It was on TV it must be true." Just because it can be found on the internet, just how accurate is it. At least the Encyclopedia Brittanica is held to rigid standards of data. As such I am left to wonder then about the overall accuracy of the research being done. Just because it is on the internet does not make it true.
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
If a teacher asks students to write a paper on Martin Luther King Jr, that same teacher ought to have at least a passing familiarity with history. Consequently, he or she should be acquainted with the notions of propaganda, bias, and people with sociopolitical agendas who lie.
Surely these kids have heard of World War II. Propaganda isn't a new idea. Any teacher who assigns 'impressionable' children any sort of research project should recognize the opportunity to teach kids that propaganda didn't end when Hitler (sorry, Godwin) died. Incidentally, even if you block the worst sites on the school network, how are you going to keep the kids off these sites at home? They're not all going to write their papers in the lab on campus...
~Idarubicin
I notice under Slashdot subculture that "Trolling and Flamebaiting" is the first heading in the table of contents. Perhaps it is accurate after all...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
I'm curious, anyone want to chime in about Encyclopedia culture elsewhere? That is, outside the English-speaking world?
I fondly remember encyclopedias from when I was a kid, but I didn't really use them so much. I don't know if I'd buy a set now if I were a parent.
Now a good Dictionary, on the other hand, is something I find indispensible. And while I use the net for that a lot (thank you mycroft for the dictionary and wikipedia search options!) I still plan to buy the next edition of the full OED... hopefully I will be able to afford it about the same time they get around to publishing the 3rd edition.
Also I have some reference works from the late 1800s and early 1900s, and I must say, they may not be up to date but they are somehow Very Cool.
This Like That - fun with words!
The same is true for newspapers. Whenever an encyclopedia or newspaper references another page or book or section, its very irritating. Especially newspaper stories. "This story continued on page 6". Not for me it isn't! With an online publication or encyclopedia you can open it in a new window and read all about it, and not even lose your place.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I must admit that I marvel at the middle-income family that invested in a $1400 set of books for their kids. Sure, you can spend that on a computer, but first of all, given inflation, that's going to be a fair bit more, and secondly, given the multi-use nature of computers, it's not (tell me it is) likely going to be a pure investment in learning.
I suppose I'm mostly glad that encyclopedias have gone the way of the stencil, as how many people could afford to get more than one or two volumes from their local K-mart (get the volume with stuff in it you're interested in!) -- and those were the discount-nature ones. But that kind of dedication to learning still awes me a little.
An out-of-date reference book will be organized in roughly the same way as the newer versions. And, for a student I'd think that how they present the information counts more than whether it's the latest information.
Are you adequate?
Anecdote.
Are you adequate?
If I had my way, I would give unrestricted access to the web (with a browser with popup blocking to avoid those porn storms) for my users. Unfortunately, if I don't block these sites, we lose funding. We are required to have a CIPA approved filter blocking "undesireable" and "inappropriate" material from the web. If we don't, we lose money, which is a bad thing.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
If I had my way, I would give unrestricted access to the web (with a browser with popup blocking to avoid those porn storms) for my users. Probably still restrictive in elementary labs, but once the kids hit secondary, they'd be able to go anywhere, since they already can at home. Teachers in my district do teach the kids about reliable sources, in particular on the internet, since it is so widely used now. Unfortunately, if I don't block these sites, we lose funding. We are required to have a CIPA approved filter blocking "inappropriate" material from the web. If we don't, we lose money, which is a bad thing.
However, there is a ray of hope shining through. While CIPA requires a safety policy that addresses "Access by minors to "inappropriate matter" on the Internet", exactly what that material is is determined by the district. So the material that needs to be blocked according to CIPA is
Obscene
Child pornography
Harmful to minors
So a district theoretically could have a fairly lax filtering policy. As a part of our state mandated tech plan, we'll be reassessing our web filtering policy this summer. Hopefully we can become less restrictive in what we block; I just need to do some political maneuvering to make sure I get the policy I want. :-p
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
Darl has got a gun
Darl has got a gun
Deposition's just begun
Now Linux is on the run
Tell me now it's untrue
What did IBM do
Well they stole some Unix IP
Novell has got to be insane!
They say the spell Linus was under
when he tried to diss Caldera
BUT NOBODY'S GONNA STOP DARL'S CLAAAAAAIM
(run away, run away from the claim)
The sellers may fade away, but the objects will remain -- perhaps long after anything as treasured as the net or discs/disks and ROMs. Don't get me wrong, I use the net everyday and even wrote about Google as a best search engine in 1998 when most people didn't know about it. But there are a few things that need to be stated.
.pdf documents at work all the time and they may read just one or two pages later. It's disgusting really. I keep all harvested information from the net as soft copy, and I print the least of anyone in our company, yet probably read the most.
;-)
Books don't boot, books don't crash and they still work when the lights go out. I can find information in them faster and more reliably than Google. When I look in an index in an encyclopedia, the page I am referred is 100% guaranteed to be there (caching aside.) Showing people how to use computers and software is my living, but I collect reference works as my hobby. I have a dozens of 100 year old books and a few over 200 years old. Yes, they are 'out of date' -- but all information asserts itself in the moment of its promulgation, and most all of it will pass. As stated earlier in the thread, Information is actually always in flux, in any age people have their beliefs of knowledge and in time the collective knowledge-base looks back and laughs. And as another poster said, information about some historical events can be highlighted in one decade vs. the next. Anybody who loves words should see what is contained in dictionaries before the medical-chemical-industrial-complex of post WWII supplanted so many great words and definitions with 'science'. (I love science, but not at the offing of language and culture.)
There will always be a wonderful need for great gobs of information at your fingertips via the Internet, but if you care for a book, it will last centuries. I don't know of too many things that people have created that has the usefulness and durability of books. They may waste a bit of space, but they are nice to look at and hold in your hands too.
Oh yeah one more thing, anybody who wants to bring up the 'save a tree' argument, should be appalled at what the internet and computers has done to the use of paper. People print out 340 page
PS: If anybody is chucking out a 9th Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, I'm looking to buy.
Vox et praetera nihil
Maybe she should set them a fairly obscure topic to research, having set up a plausible-looking but extremely inaccurate page on the subject for them to get snared by! Sometimes people only learn from their mistakes...
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Psh...so what?? This only proves that the net is growing and becoming a better place for all of us. Reading and learning about history and other fields of studies, should be free of charge to every person in this world. This only means that the world is getting better, not worse.
http://www.palmzone.net
Horse and Camel sales are down slightly this year, Some experts agree this is probably due to the sharp rise in car production, altho no solid evidence has been produced to support this claim.
I write encyclopedias for a living. General encyclopedias like Britannica are losing out to the Web, but as the article says more specialized books with longer articles are not. But then those things usually end up in big libraries, where they cost less and are more efficient than five hundred terminal licenses. I'm not worried because the medium is changing but professionally produced, checked, and trustworthy information is always going to be better than an unknown source. The trouble is trustworthy sources are only available to those who can pay or are accustomed to using libraries. In this case the Web may actually be contributing to social divisions.
An al-Hallaj reference?
I was always irritated as a kid because our encyclopedia (bought when I was about 3) was woefully out of date.
At work, I can search google for the technical details of solutions to problems quickly and easily. I can find documentation on programming languages and obscure references for hardware.
I can discover bits of geography relevent to the world as it is today, rather than how the borders were at the time of publishing. I can get differing opinions of world events.
The articles available on the internet might not be quite as detailed as you would find in Encyclopedias, but considering how I found much of it to be inaccurate, outdated, wrong or misleading, I think it's a good tradeoff. The encyclopedia is dead. Long live the Internet!
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
I'm not just suggesting we're more susceptible to manipulation by malevolent conspiracies, in a tinfoil-hat sort of way, but also wondering if we're in danger of losing the archive trail our civilisation has had up to now.
> The stultifying atmosphere of a prison-like public school may have been fine for acclimating a child to work in the industrial era. It'll hardly prepare her to be competitive in the 21st century. Your point reminds me of the tired "school choice is bad because it only helps the children whose parents take advantage of it" argument. Hmm, so you are arguing it is better to not fix the public school system. You wonder why people think there are some social issues with that attitude? > You'd rather hear a child droning: Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. Interestign argument, esp. since it contradicts the whole idea that those 'lost tools of learning' is based on, don't brute force facts but learn to think. You will notice that the difference between alpha and beta ways of learning are somewhat related to learning brute force and learning to think. Yes, a kid who learned to do it the smart way is better of.
Now that the Web geeks solved the door to door encyclopedia salesmen problem, can they do something about the Jehovah's Witnesses next? maybe video popups that won't go away, disable the keyboard / mouse, turn up the sound, electrify the power button and hijack your printer to print tracts about you going to hell.
I'd trust an encyclopedia before Google for general basic research
Of course you meant to say the information you found using Google, but point made.
I disagree to some extent. The problem with encyclopaedias is that they are written from a cultural viewpoint that introduces biases. These biases are often unrecognizd by readers and publishers alike. For example, I assume that the Napoleonic wars are described very differently in French encyclopaedias than in English encyclopaedias. I am sure that each of the publishers will assure us that theirs is the accurate description.
Using the information on the web you can get a lot of different viewpoints, and often some that make a lot of sense that have been ignored by traditional educational systems. A simple example is the handling of native American issues. Until recently very little space was devoted in encyclopaedias to the positions of those cultures even though those postions were just as valid as the positions of the encyclopaedia writers of the mid 20th century.
Although there is a lot of biased information on the web, the presence of so much obvious junk requires us to look very critically at the information. The ironic part is that this forces us to be more critical and may actually improve our chances of getting closer to the truth. On the other hand, the hidden biases of encyclopaedias are so subtle that they seldom force us to evaluate the validity of their underlying cultural assumptions.
Oh, yikes! I was feeling educationally superior until you mentioned semicolon placement!
Otherwise we'd be facing lawsuits for looking up information on the internet.
Some are trying to do the archiving you are talking about. It isn't perfect, but the "wayback machine" is one of those attempts. I don't know the web address but it should be easy to Google.
scripsit blorg:
Y'know, that saddens me. I do grading for upper-division history courses at an American university, and I something similar. All too often, I can't even get to grading the content of the papers, because the writing is so bad. It isn't just mechanical flaws (misspellings, run-on sentences, etc.), but often near-total incoherence.
I would have hoped, honestly, that the situation in Ireland was better. You're supposed to have a pretty good education system over there...
FWIW, our department requires two historical methods (research and writing) courses for undergraduate majors, one in the third year and one in the fourth.
In principio creauit Linus Linucem.
scripsit Mose250:
My familiarity is only with undergrads, as I don't really have any contact with younger students. I find that too many of our students seem to think that research begins and ends with an AOL or MSN search. There's very little use even of something like JSTOR, much less actual paper (gasp!) journals...
In principio creauit Linus Linucem.
If you have 1000 people and only 100 of them have PhDs in Physics, then even if the other 900 disagree, the opinions that matter are the opinions of those 100 physicists.
Not true. It might be more true to say that the opinions of the 100 Ph.D.'s count for MORE that the opinions of the other 900, but not that they opinions of the other 900 don't matter.
Basically a PH.D. is just a tag to insure that certain persons are duly indoctrinated into the conventional wisdom of the time. It does not make them smarter, it does not make them more "right" than anyone else - it simply means that they can converse with other experts in the field using a common framework that all understand and they at least KNOW the scientific method.
I trust a PH.D. no more than I trust anyone. Each has his or her own personal, politcal and economic goals. That is why the tobacco and drug industries (and now the Bush administration) have such an easy time of getting tame researchers to publish studies to support any position they want to have supported, no matter what position that may be. It can be yes or no, blue or green, top or bottom, safe or dangerous - you name it and a PH.D. can be bought to support it.
For what it is worth, a friend of mine is a schoolteacher, and he (yes, some men still teach) demonstrated this by showing a website that was all about the secret tunnel under the Golden Gate Bridge. Apparently, it was the brainchild of some web designer. And I'm sorry, the link is long-gone. It had all the "officiality," complete with doctored photos, industry links, etc. Would fool any schoolkid around. I'd be in stitches laughing for the schoolteacher far removed from the Bay Area who didn't think to investigate this, gave the kid a good grade, and was none the wiser.
I hope you're paying attention, people.
If you laud this and pan outsourcing manufacturing jobs, you Don't Get It.(tm)
Technology is changing existing models in nearly everything. To embrace it when it's convenient for you, and decry it when it's not, is the height of hypocrisy.
I purchased the 2001 Brittanica set that included the Great Books of the Western World. Couldn't be happier with it. I'm an established Google user, but I love the visceral satisfaction that a set of books offers.
I can also be sure that if I want to find coherent yet concise information about a topic which has at least been cursorily edited for objectivity and veracity.
Much of the non-technical information on the web is tainted by opinion, usually because the source is a news outlet trying to sell 'the big story' or because it's an individual with an agenda. While I'm sure there is great information on the web, more often than not, finding it is like digging for pearls in shit. An interesting topic for discussion would be how the easy dissemination of information affects society when there are no controls on how truthful or objective the information is. Will people become jaded skeptics who cross-check every bit of information? Will our own history begin to wash away in a sea of misinformation?
The meek shall inherit the earth, in 3 by 6 plots. - Lazerus Long
Duh, everyone knows the semicolon goes between the "L" and the "'". Lack of education indeed!
Obvious exits are NORTH, SOUTH, and DENNIS.
E2's subjectivity is a strength and also a weakness. Often you want to hear opinions, and Wikipedia can fail to deliver them. E2, is at its best a plurality of informed individual voices, which give you insightful subjectivity that wikipaedia won't.
The unfocussed nature of the E2 project is both it's strong point and it's downfall. Is it an encyclopaedia, a creative writing exercise or blog? All are found there, but much material is in the grey areas, which is not what you want if you need to look something up.
E2 delivering at its best as an information resource is sadly damn rare - it's very much a crapshoot if a topic will have good content, one paragraph of poorly punctuated teenage ranting, or nothing. This is due to the limited capacity of the small crew there, and the arrogant, self-serving, ego-stroking echo-chamber in which the management operates.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Yes, scientists are as close minded as anyone. However, they follow the path of science. Therefore, they mean SOMETHING.
As far as cold fusion is concerned, I'm neither a scientist nor have I read much in this area (layperson knowledge), but you are right: there is something happening. BUT the opinion of the scientific community is that it isn't cold fusion. It is some other phenomenon. I think we'll discover that it is something new (something we don't understand well right now); however, it isn't cold fusion.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
And I would just like to say that we in Dallas are damn glad you finally left! Now, if we could just get you to stop posting on slashdot.
In Finland one of the major publishing houses have published a completely new ecyclopedia called Factum.
The price is a bit high, 796
"Venerable"? I guess we're talking about three whole years in Internet time ;-)
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I've heard lots of moaning & groaning from "techies" about all the IT jobs being outsourced overseas (mainly to India). I think this is great, but not solely for the savings to companies. I think it's great because your average American IT employee is an arrogant prlck.
:-)
Have you ever dealt with any of these people? I do, on a daily basis. They seem to be living in the past, a time I'll call the "Golden Age of Computing." In the Golden Age, computers were a mystery, and if you could make one write "hello world!" to a monitor, you were an intellectual god(ess). The internet was solely the domain of academics & government researchers, & the commoners hardly knew it existed. In 2004, this is no longer the case, but these IT people's attitude has remained stuck in the Golden Age. My grandmother can design & publish a web-site. My 11 year old can design a database. Sure, someone who holds a computer science degree can probably make a better web-site or database, but why is that justification for looking down their nose at those of us who choose other fields?
No other profession feels justified in being openly rude to their coworkers & customers based solely upon the fact that they have knowledge & skills that the others don't have. If my accountant were to sigh & rudely say "hang on" just because I didn't understand something he said, I'd find another accountant. If all the accountants in the US had this attitude, AND their were perfectly willing & able accountants in India who were actually friendly, I'd take my business there if possible...and now it's possible. This may be the unacknowledged benefit to outsourcing to India. The truth hurts. Isn't it ironic that the golden egg of the IT industry is the very medium that makes it possible to outsource their jobs?
Indian IT workers are friendly, and they appreciate the opportunity to serve you. They work much harder for a fraction of the pay, and they do it with a smile. I've NEVER encountered a rude Indian. I'm sure they exist, but they are about as rare as a friendly American IT worker. When you add this to the fact that they have as good, if not better, an education than their American counterpart, I say welcome aboard.
Now bash away...I won't read it anyway...
Your assumption is incorrect. Yes, many of our contributors are from western english speaking cultures. We also have a significant minority of east asians (Chinese and Japanese) and Eastern Europeans. Minority viewpoints do get represented. And on the english wikipedia, we tend to pull in some traslations from the other language Wikipedias.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Wikipedia is free (as in beer), I have to pay for comptons, brittanica, etc. I know which one I'll go for, esspecially as a broke student or kid :)
:)
If I *really* need an encyclopedia, I'll go to the library.
I've found that middle aged adults seem to be the most gullible as far as "I read it on the internet, thus it must be true" -- young people seem to grasp the concept that a million monkeys on a million typewriters mostly spew crap
Though I've been pretty turned off encyclopedias since elementary school, when a teacher used one to "prove" to me that the siberian desert *must* be hot, because all deserts are hot. When one has multiple sources, this is a slightly less likely mistake. (I wish I remembered which encyclopedia it was.)
Not that this is particularly politically feasable, but I would think that showing the site to the kids, along with showing what bits are wrong (a brief look at that particular site shows all *sorts* of places to start), maybe along with a class exercise in fact checking and some discussion as to why the people who wrote this site chose to portray Dr Martin Luther King Jr in this way (hint: kids get 'because they are mean and selfish people' pretty early). In other words, rather than hiding it, use it as a learning experience.
It might be significantly more politically feasable if one chose a different site, with a completely different topic.
It would probably sink in more if this were done on a semi regular basis throughout the school years (using different sites -- maybe even choosing topics to correlate with other classroom topics)
Of course, none of these ideas are new (I think I swiped them off of some of my better teachers) but they don't get nearly enough mention, imo.
Unless you're using a Dvorak keyboard, in which case the semicolon is just to the right of the left Shift.
Heh. I remember 2-3 years ago, I bought a 24-pack of Kraft Singles at the grocery store, and it came with a CD-ROM encyclopedia.
Cheese and an entire encyclopedia of knowledge for one low price.
I saved the package just because of the absurdity of it.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
... is that it is extremely short.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
It doesn't explain why you presume its relevance by actually telling it.
Are you adequate?
the mentioned papers were handed out for comparison, then collected back again by the lecturers. I assume they were a bit scared of a law-suit from the government for breaching their NDA or whatever they were being held under. And I won't name names as I don't want to get said lecturers in trouble either.
:-(
I left Australia to teach in China before the draft was finalised, so I don't know which version (or compromise between) ended up being used. I sincerely hope the govt. backed down on it.
Sorry to be so useless
PS. Sorry for the delay getting back. They're upgrading the backbone in China ATM and we have rolling nationwide outages for days at a time this month.
The man with no surname and a silly hat
On the universe: It's bunk.