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."

Comments

Something that should've been in the original post

[sik0fewl]

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.

You are correct

[Raul654]

(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.

Re:You are correct

[Raul654]

1) Logged in users have access to a "watchlist." It tells you when the articles you are watching were last changed. So if someone comes along and wipes out a years worth of work, it will be reverted very, very quickly (all changes are reverseble).

2) You make two mistaken assumptions. (A) Not everyone edits all articles - people tend to stick to what they know. Therefore, articles are generally edited by informed users. (B) A lot of Wikipedia's changes (50%, if I had to guess) come from a relatively small pool of very active contributors (200 or so), most of whom are very well educated. If you look up an article on Nuclear physics, you'll probably get something that was written by someone majoring in/with a BS in physics or chemistry. So it's not PHDs, but it's not Joe Q Average either.

Re:You are correct

[Razor Blades are Not]

Evolution is theory taught in our schools as fact, this is what really gets those of us who believe in creation or creational-evolution "in a twist".
Nice one. So you slip in Evolution with Junk Science, and hope that this makes you sound reasonable.

Evolution is taught as fact in the same way that gravity is taught as fact. The theory of Evolution is as valid based on our current evidence as the three laws of thermodynamics. Now Einstein came along and said "hey - what about this relativity thing I've come up with?" and lo and behold, Isaacs theories didn't go far enough. Does that mean we all float off into space because gravity doesn't work ? Does that mean I can't use a parabola to descibe the motion of a ball thrown through the air ? Nope. Same thing with Evolution. The evidence is there, and hundreds of scientific disciplines rely on this same evidence that supports Evolution for everything from dating ancient objects, to geological surveying and microbiology. Evolution happened... although the specifics of how are still very much under the microscope...

The suggestion that Global warming idea is on the same footing as the Theory of Evolution is a neat distraction, but it doesn't fly.

It's fine to doubt the integrity of specific scientists, or even the political process within the community at large - doubt is a good thing. But lets look at the evidence.. can you point to a specific failure ? Where did the scientific process fall down exactly ? Cold Fusion... nope, their peers caught that.. Global Warming, huh? Jury is still out on that one, waiting for more evidence...

No, I'm not buying it.
Even if the Theory of Evolution is completely wrong*, creationism cannot be pedalled as a scientific theory. There's absolutely no way of falsifying it. It's not testable, because it can never be revised upon discovering new evidence. It remains immutable, and evidence is routinely discarded or rationalized to fit the theory, rather than the other way around.

Creation-Science isn't science.

_______________________________________________
* it isn't.

Wasn't this one of the selling points of CD-ROMs?

[sharkb8]

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.

Response

[Raul654]

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.

There is another option as well

[dsplat]

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.