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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."
I just checked Britannica.com and I can see another reason why people avoid it - it's terrible for access, where as Wikipedia is a nice and simple browsable site, much closer to a reference book with cross-reference links.
You hit the front page of Brittanica.com and you get two Flash movies (which I don't see because I use Gnash and have it set to pause on load and not play) and the side panel animates itself open. I decide to try and browse and I can't because the Flash is rendered above the "browse" pop-up layer. I do a search and there's no obvious search button, you just have to hit the Enter key and assume it'll work. Rather than giving you results or the page you want it gave me a quick "light box" animation before popping up another layer. Once I do get to the article it takes ages to load because of the adverts and a slow caching site (ironically) and then it proceeds to plaster its "pay for premium" advert over what I was just about to read! When you close the "pay for premium" layer it won't even go away - apparently details about "encyclopedia" are a premium topic and so it keeps popping back every few seconds!
With an interface like that there's no wonder people prefer Wikipedia given that it's "accurate enough" for most people's needs.
they're going to have an expert review it in 20 minutes?
What about a change to some obscure British scifi novel, like The Last Legionary? (By Douglas Hill)
This is never gonna work.
(* I have made changes to both of those pages in wikipedia, and though obscure topics, it wasn't long before further changes were made clarifying my own poorly written points.)
Back in the earlier day of the web encylopedia Americana was free. Britannica was a pay site. Then Britannica went free and it was dominant. But for most of this decade Britannica has not been a free site, which means links are low value.
Further:
1) Wikipedia has vastly more articles than Britannica. It isn't even close.
2) Wikipedia covers a wider range of topics.
3) Wikipedia articles are longer and more detailed
4) Wikipedia articles are much more web friendly with their "see also" web references.... In many ways playing the role yahoo used to play
5) Wikipedia articles offer history and talk pages which can provide tons of additional information
I can't see why Britannica would even think that in 2009 they should rank above Wikipedia. Wikipedia vs. Britannica discussions were interesting in 2005/6 and you could make a case. Today they aren't even close. Wikipedia functions reasonably well against specialized encyclopedias in their specialties.
I have always been a strong supporter of Britannica. I've bought lots of their products over the years and still use their encyclopedia on my laptop as a mobile solution. But they really aren't in the same league anymore as reference works. I think Columbia Encyclopedia makes a fantastic one volume reference work but I wouldn't rate it not to Britannica. Quantity matters.
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Even assuming they started to get a flood of content I don't see how they would deal with it. Are they really ready to fact check say 1000 pages of new content a day? If they want to do what they are talking about they need to do something like partner with http://en.citizendium.org/
Britannica could create a distinctive advantage for citizendium and at the same time Singer has put in place enough people to help with content additions.
It's also the fact that Wikipedia just has so much more content and depth, especially on specific topics (Britannica just has articles on the big and obvious stuff). The sheer volume of information on Wikipedia makes Britannica look like a Kindergartner's encyclopedia. Just this morning, on an earlier topic on plutonium, someone on /. pointed to a fascinating Wikipedia entry on "Cherenkov Radiation" (in response to someone saying that radiation didn't actually make things glow in real life). Later I went and typed in "Cherenkov Radiation" in Britannica just to compare and got...well nothing. Britannica has an article on "radiation" in general, but nothing nearly as specific as this.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Just looking at Britannica.com's home page will reveal why they aren't ranked as well as Wikipedia. Upwards of 90% of the home page content is irrelevant to the majority of users, who are there because they want to look something up, not look at the video of the day, play with the "Featured" flash movie, or read about how Britannica is involved in Advocacy for Animals. This is an excellent example of web design molded around the needs of internal customers and requirements rather than the needs of the end user. The flash movies swoop in as they load, drawing attention away from the user's goal: the search box in the upper-middle of the screen, which itself is visually subservient to the arrogant "Premium Membership - Free Trial" button in the upper-right.
Both google and wikipedia did it right. Give the user a search box, a logo, and some language options. Trust them to explore your system on their own.
All kidding aside, Brittanica has a legitimate gripe - Wikipedia's height in the search rankings is due mostly to the fact that it's coded as a gigantic linkfarm.
The difference between Wikipedia and every other linkfarm out there, however, is that 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. If not for this preferential treatment, wikipedia wouldn't show up nearly as high in search results.
And of course, it doesn't help anyone that wikipedia actively took steps in recent months to screw with others, such as implementing automatic nofollow on external links, thus making sure that inter-wikipedia links are the only links that get help by being listed there.
I'd love to see Google treat wikipedia like they treat everyone else. Won't happen, but it would mean Google would have more meaningful search results.
Starting in High School we were taught never to do research off an encyclopedia. You use it to get a general idea about the topic which will help guide you to more appropriate sources for your research.
Britannica has been putting themselves on the high ground when they really weren't so high up. While Britannnica may have better researched articles, however Wikipedia for the most part does a good job at what encyclopedias are good for. A way to get a basic understanding of the topic so you then can go further in and do some real research.
I'm just waiting for schools be it junior, high or college to assign "wikipedia papers" as assignments. You could do it a variety of ways. I'd give each student a randomly generated article, then have them "grade it." Explain what's wrong with it in content, citations, grammar. Then I'd assign the student's to fix everything that they've ID'd as wrong with the given article. I'd then have students review and grade each others articles. You'd start of with existing known good articles and then you'd eventually have them build up to writing full articles on randomly assigned topics.
The educational value of this isn't about improving wikipedia at all. It's about educating students to ID poorly written/researched work, fix it, and write their own fairly decently researched "papers"/articles. Using wikipedia as a classroom tool though helps in several things. They actually learn through experience that not everything written in wikipedia is holy writ "right," and that other sources have the same sort of flaws. They then become used to improving stuff out of habit.
Long term it does end up improving wikipedia and it becomes more and more difficult to find grammer or factual mistakes.