Slashdot Mirror
Britannica Goes After Wikipedia and Google
kzieli writes "Britannica is going to allow viewers to edit articles, with changes to be reviewed by editors within 20 minutes. There is also a bit of a rant against Google for ranking Wikipedia above Britannica on most search terms."
-1, Didn't Read the Article
The changes won't appear on the site until they have been reviewed by someone paid by Britannica.
They must really be on the ropes. They're into full-on me-tooism, but obviously don't get what makes Wikipedia awesome at all.
-Peter
Google ranks Wikipedia articles higher than Britannica articles because Wikipedia.com is linked to more than Britannica.com.
In fact I would wager good money that Wikipedia.con is one of the top 5 linked to domains PERIOD, probably shortly after sites like cnn.com, myspace.com, facebook.com
Google doesn't just manually set it's rankings. They're set by the web. If Britannica wants higher rankings they need to get more people to link to them as an authority.
The algorithm does not care one bit about which link is more elite, classy, or respected, only about it's relation to other pages on the web. The fact that Wikipedia comes up as the number one result simply illustrates just how popular it is. Ironically, if Jorge read Wikipedia, he might know that.
It's interesting to see that while Britannica lacks a search result for PageRank, Wikipedia has a full article containing mathematical formulas and informative history and commentary about the algorithm. It also cites 16 references and an additional 6 in further reading. Which encyclopedia is inferior, again?
Now, certainly, Wikipedia should not be used as an authoritative source, but its PageRank alone demonstrates just how effective it has been at bringing knowledge to the masses. Wikipedia is almost always my first stop for a search because it often has a full article for a topic that I might otherwise spend minutes searching for on Google and will have many links to related topics and sources for the article if I want to dig deeper. Most of the time though, I'm not looking for a fully researched, academic quality paper, just a quick overview of the subject. I have a feeling that most people use it for the same reason.
Scholarpedia looks set to address this difference, it is already quite good in its early stages. Essentially wikipedia where only scholars can edit.
Britannica is now out of date. The FLASH ADS on their site are abrasive and annoying; I will refuse to visit there site anymore due to this behaviour alone.
They aren't the only ones, one of the biggest selling points traditional encyclopedia's had was that they weren't wikipedia if they emulate it too closely they will disenfranchise that audience.
Anyone who is happy with the encyclopedic equivalent of lucky dip is already gushing about the 'awesomeness' of Wikipedia, they are not about to start helping elsewhere. Although perhaps some of the authors with genuine knowledge who have given up on Wikipedia's editfests might be interested in a more closely controlled equivalent.
Truth = facts, dumbass.
Being an anonymous coward I doubt that you're nothing more than a troll, but truth != facts. You can tell the truth but still be wrong. Truth is only determined by what the person speaking knows whereas facts are universally true (that's what makes them facts.)
I just did a quicky informal comparison. Searched Britannica for a few terms that I know Wikipedia has good articles about (because I read them recently). And I don't mean the pop-culture kinds of terms that Wikipedia is really great for (just try to find an article about, say, Bubba Ho-tep, in Britannica.)
ADO(ActiveX Data Objects): nothing at all. Much ado about Shakespeare, though.
OLE DB: nothing at all.
But it did suggest an article about "decibel" (the unit of measurement.) Ok, let's see what it's got: One brief paragraph. Textually describes the math (rather than giving an equation). Doesn't really explain at all _why_ people like decibel measurements. Mentions the confusing 10*log vs 20*log thing for powers and amplitudes, but doesn't deign to explain why it is that way.
Wikipedia: Lengthy, informative, and as far as I can see, completely accurate.
That is why people link to Wikipedia. And that is why it has a high Google rank.
Perhaps with more user contributions Britannica can catch up somewhat, but it'll be one hell of an uphill climb at this point.
As far as contributing to Wikipedia is concerned, it doesn't matter whether a piece of information is true or not. The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth -- that is, whether readers are able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether we think it is true. If you want to say something in Wikipedia, you should be prepared to cite a reliable source verifying what you say. It doesn't matter if it's true and you just know it.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Of course whats handy about wikipedia is that it almost always includes a good handful of links (and often meatspace citations as well) that makes it very easy to dig right into that additional research.
You can get the answers by asking slashdot too.
Tin = Sn = Atomic number 50 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin]
Google directly replies with 50 if you ask "what is the atomic number of tin"
Chickens = 300 eggs/year = 5.77 a week [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken]
Second result in Google for "how many eggs does a chicken lay in a week" contains the answer in the summary.
So, you can just ask Google these questions in natural language and it's not bad at all, quicker than scanning the Wikipedia article (esp. for Chicken)
Wikipedia is the first result for chicken and for tin.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
You forgot the much more dangerous criteria of Notability, which is a considerably more arbitrary filter on what can and what cannot be on Wikipedia, and has abundantly misused throughout its history.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
There's a lot of work being done on Wikipedia's search functionality (it's a heavily tweaked version of Lucene). It's not better than Googling with "site:en.wikipedia.org" as yet, but it's way better than it was even six months ago, and work is ongoing.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Wooosh...
Wiki rarely lets facts get in the way http://www.stattenfield.com/keith/blog/2006/08/09/theres-must-be-a-lot-of-wrong-atude-in-wikipedia/ I'm sure there must be other examples, but how would you ever know?
Watch those corners
I suspect that while we grew up with the concept of "final" versions of thing, including truth, people who grow up with the Web as a reference will think of works as constantly evolving and never rooted. Truth, as it is, will always be revised to be (hopefully) more accurate, or occasoinally defaced.
Somehow this seems better than the authoratative books in the library which still say that dinosaurs were slow lizards and there is no water on mars.
The ______ Agenda
porn-peddler Wales managed to fob Wikipedia off as a "nonprofit" site, and convinced Google not to downgrade its linking weight according to the formula they use for all the other linkfarms out there.
o rly? citation needed pls.
Wikipedia gets its high PageRank from the millions of external sites linking to it that do not link to each other. It could easily get nil points from its internal links and still appear top of every search result.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
Indeed, I always use my own search form for Wikipedia that does a googling with "site:en.wikipedia.org" appended.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_database
You can download the whole of Wikipedia from there.
I think you are correct but their problem they had is web created content was a classic example of a Disruptive innovation for Britannica.
The problem Britannica had was that the early adopters of web enabled reference materials wanted things that Britannica users didn't or didn't care much about:
-- strong web connectivity
-- user created content
-- lots of specialized topics
-- a focus on geek culture issues
It didn't look like a threat at all until it became a major threat and then they only had a year or two to respond before they were just wiped out. Encarta and Americana drove them into a "flight to quality" and wikipedia drove them out of the market all together (essentially).
During that year I though they if they wanted to stay with that model was they didn't keep the barrier high enough. As WSJ.com showed will pay for information that is substantially better than what is available for free. Britannica while very good was net better enough than Americana and later Wikipedia in the early days.
Had they partnered with all the specialized encyclopedias they would had an online encylopedia with say 2000 volumes and the barrier would have been much too high for wikipedia and for that matter for google. The web would have been a very different place.
Where they can really function well now is doing reference works on specialized topics that there is no general interest in but still a market. For example legal encylopedias.