Slashdot Mirror
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."
everything2 is also excellent and offers some great insight and even advice.
[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.
You ever read Ayn Rand's Anthem? If not you should, it's a really good book. As a matter of fact, one of the premises of the book was what would happen if there was a society more interested in the status quo and change (modeled after the commies). There were a lot of interesting points -- one of which was that light bulbs would never be made because the industry of candlemakers would be put out of business. And if you don't benefit your fellow man, you must be evil.
Sometimes I wish I were a literary nerd so I could explain things better. Oh well, here's a link to a Wikipedia summary.
Actually, it would be *far* more likely if Google had never come around. Google is the single driving force that has pushed and pushed at the other search engines to try and keep up ( sites like Teoma and the new Yahoo are getting closer in terms of accuracy, but Google has been at the top for so long now that it has found its brand name being added to the dictionary as a verb, and is constantly appearing in pop culture references like TV shows and Movies. You can't pay for that kind of advertising ).
If it weren't for Google pioneering the slick, streamlined search interface, the massive popup banners and "portal" monstrosities of AltaVista and Yahoo would still be the standard.. in fact, they would probably be even worse.
And thus, if it weren't for Google, searching for stuff on the internet would still be so incredibly painful and take so long that I could probably find it faster in the Britannica.
People just don't give Google enough credit. They totally revolutionized their space, and are still revolutionizing it( check out Google labs if you don't believe me ). You don't see many companies doing that nowadays.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
"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.
I read Wikipedia sometimes for hours at a day, and I admit that I always wonder how the writers of the articles knew so much, but at the same time, I've never doubted the factual base for the articles. There are usually (perhaps always) links in non-stub articles. Glancing through some of the books in my family's 30-book encyclopedia, I see no attribution at all for any of the entries. Granted, the writers of encyclopedias are ostensibly scholars with reputations on the line. However, the Wikipedia is live and can be updated by anyone and has version history. Also, as I mentioned, the Wikipedia articles have links and attribution. A sample article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlad_Drakul
Incidentally, my original intention on replying to this article was to mention that while I would not buy a paper encyclopedia, (the major benefits of the Wikipedia being: content flux; contribution; instant searches; massive amount of content along with an infinite space for growth) I would gladly give money to the Wikipedia. The latest fund drive for the Wikipedia generously exceeded its goals within hours, so obviously I'm not the only one.
If I may be bold for a moment, I'd also like to point out that the spirit of the first encyclopedia was to be knowledge of the people and for the people, so that everyone may be educated. If the web (again, a series of "ends") were available in the sixteenth century, the encyclopedia, I'd argue, would not have been published in medium as expensive, bulky and unportable as paper. When was the last time you sat down and opened the encyclopedia instead of using the web?
To read more about the concept of encyclopaedia in dozens of languages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia