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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."
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before it could take an hour to find information, and then more than a few hours to then find that information was OUT OF DATE.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
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.
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...
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.
Not all homeschoolers are motivated by a desire to insulate their kids from reality. This, for example, is the basis of our homeschooling method, and it elucidates many of the aspects of the state sponsored education I want to avoid. It was written in 1947, but as far as I am concerned, it matches today quite well. Better, perhaps.
All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.
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
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.)
A quote I have hanging on my wall:
That will only become more true as the pace of change quickens. Artificial scarcity be damned.
(Right beside that quote I've also got a few Singularity quotes, about the exponential nature of progress, and the likelihood of mankind surving these next few critical decades.)
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Power to the Peaceful
Problem is, would this lead to a tyranny of the majority? If something like Wikipedia were around in Gallileo's time, would it ever say that the earth is round?
Now, Wikipedia may very well have a method of dealing with this problem, but I am not aware of it. Can someone offer insights?
#define DRM chmod 000
Whatever's counted as scientific 'fact' today is also due to consensus.
I'm not sure how good that argument is, considering that an encyclopedia published in Gallileo's time would be subject to similar pressures and would probably also claim the earth is flat.
D
Good point, but it's made redundant by the fact that Galileo was silenced in his time anyway. If the fact were that Wikipedia would censor something otherwise published then your point is fair, but instead it would censor something that was censored anyway.
Also modern society is much more diverse in ideas. While many subjects are taboo, the likelihood is there will be people open minded enough to accept people think differently to them and leave the articles as they are.
There are two problems with that:
One is that you don't see the collective result of *everybody* peer reveiwing the entry - you are only guranteed to get the result of the last person who edited the entry. So if 1000 people agreed with an entry that said "X is true", and one person edited it to say "X is false", if that one person is the most recent person to have touched it, then *his* version of things is all you'll see. You're only guaranteed to see a version which is in agreement with the previous viewer's opinions, not a version that is an average of everyone's opinions that came before him. One person can wipe out an entire years worth of peer review on an entry in a single moment.
The other problem is that even if it does reflect accurately the opnions of all the 'peers' who reviewed it, the entry will then only be accurate in those areas where public opinion reflects the truth. This is often not the case when the public is poorly informed. I'd much rather read an encyclopedia article on nuclear power that was edited and approved by nuclear scientists than one that was edited and approved by a collection of J. Random Users. Science is one area where this can be a problem, and any area where stereotyping by the public is common is another. (For example, let's say I (an atheist) got invited to witness someone's pagan summer solstice celebrations. Before I decide if I want to do that, I'd like to read up on what those celebrations entail. I'd trust a source that I kenw was written by actual pagans on the matter before I'd trust a source that was written by the public at large, given that such a source is likely to contain incorrect stereotypes.)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
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.
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.
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.
Consensus and evidence. Science doesn't espouse things like evolution and gravity because they have popular support; they are considered scientific fact because of the wealth of evidence supporting them, and when new evidence comes to light, even well-established theories get thrown out on their ear. Popular support won't get you very far in science unless you have solid, credible evidence to back it up.
This is what gets the creationists and the flat-earth types all in a twist; they can't present credible evidence to the scientific community to support their claims, so they claim that there is some sort of conspiracy against them, when nothing could be further from the truth.
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I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
All of this discussion assumes that the sole purpose of owning an encyclopedia is information access.
Many middle-class households (the only ones who could afford a traditional print encyclopedia) bought them for their symbolic value: they showed that you were reasonably well-educated, that you valued education, that you could afford encyclopedias. They also bought them because of pressure not to "let your kids get behind" in an increasingly competitive academic environment.
These are precisely the reasons that many parents bought (and continue to buy) home computers. Just look at how personal computeres were marketed in the early 1980s, when it was not at all clear why you would want one. Look at how they are marketed to parents today.
I'll have to take your word for it. I've spent enough time reading Ayn Rand's ravings -- time I'll never recover. Her political writing vacillates between the blindingly obvious and the blindingly stupid, and I doubt her fiction is any more meritorious.
I'm not a Randroid or an Objectivist, but I have read and enjoyed both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead; her two first real novels, as I recall. Both were fantastic, and both made very solid points about a number of good things -- the power of the unfettered mind, the crime of stealing the fruits of one's labor, and the travesty of assuming that the best world is one in which everyone is equal. We need our geniuses, just as we need our burger-flippers.
The problem is, after these were written, Rand started buying into her own press. She started writing crap like Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. She took some good general ideas, and made very bad hard-and-fast rules of of them, completely ignoring any evidence to the contrary.
In this, Rand is an example of exactly how one should not handle criticism. Instead of reconsidering her viewpoints in light of constructive critique, she violently lashed out at anyone who questioned her Divine Word.
But that doesn't mean that she didn't have some good ideas.
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I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
...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.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
But! Even following the scientific method we are still not sure. Maybe throughout history gravity pulled at 9.5N/kg and it gradually changed to 9.8 in say... 1743. It might be scheduled to change back in 2014. Heck the world could have been created yesterday with all of our memories and everything by a supreme being!! (I know not a very good explanation)
This is known as the Problem of Induction. In a nutshell, it states that inductive logic is itself not valid; e.g., we can not make statements about anything unknown by looking at things that we do know. In addition, even our knowledge of the past and future are suspect; we have no knowledge that the past is static, and no proof that our estimates about the future will ever come to pass. We have no non-inductive proof that dropping a ball from a tower will cause it to fall, because assuming that the world will continue to work as it always has (e.g., previous balls dropped from towers did fall).
This can be handled one of two ways.
The first is that one can state that we can (and do) know absolutely nothing -- the universe could have been a fruitcake ten seconds ago, and changed form in such a way that we never knew it. Some deity could have created things; or the universe could have congealed out of Lime Jell-O. Logic is invalid and useless.
The problem with this viewpoint is that, if one were to really subscribe to it, there would be no point in making plans. No reason to even live; after all, you don't know whether or not your existence is itself real, or if it will just stop in a second when the universe becomes solid Jell-O again. This is not a very practical viewpoint, nor one compatible with our biology or psychology -- we inherently use past events to predict future results. Ever gotten sick from eating one type of food, and avoided that type of food in the future? Exactly.
The second way of dealing with the problem of induction is by making one assumption -- that things we have observed in the past did happen, and will continue to happen in the future. Note that this means that the events occur -- we may be wrong in our interpretation of said events. This is the principle upon which all of the knowledge of Man is founded, including science.
We can make a lot of measures in a lot of different times; we can apply statistical measures, making our theory more and more "scientific". But we can never say that it is absolutely "scientifically proven". Gravity at 9.8 can be the "best" Scientific explanation. This is totally subjective.
Any human viewpoint is, by this definition, subjective; we are not omnipotent nor omniscient, and therefore cannot ever see every single aspect of every single problem we encounter. We are limited to using the tools at hand; namely, our senses, and our ability to reason, which is derived solely from the assumption of pragmatism.
In fact, it is this admission that none of our knowledge can be 'truly objective' that renders scientific facts so strong. Whereas dogmatic sources of knowledge claim to hold perfect truths, scientific theories have the built-in intellectual credibility to allow for our human weaknesses. Scientific facts change as our understanding grows; they allow for us to make mistakes. In fact, the scientific process rewards those that find mistakes, and the greater the mistake, the bigger the reward. It is a self-correcting process.
Occam said that the simplest theory was the best. But is it really the truest?
What William of Occam said was that, given two or more competing theories with equal support, the most simple of all the theories is the best one to assume correct, because it will have less loopholes to check, and will be less likely to have mistakes. The important part is that the competing theories require equal evidence -- Occam's Razor does not apply in any other circumstance.
It's not a matter of being the, er, 'truest'; it's a matter of being the best theory that fits the data; shoul
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I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
...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