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After 244 Years, the End For the Dead Tree Encyclopedia Britannica
Rick Zeman writes "According to the New York Times, it's the end of the road for the printed Encyclopedia Brittanica, saying, '...in recent years, print reference books have been almost completely wiped out by the Internet and its vast spread of resources, particularly Wikipedia, which in 11 years has helped replace the authority of experts with the wisdom of the crowds.' The last print edition will be the 32-volume 2010 edition."
They will still have their website, software and other products still around. They are just discontinuing the book series and blaming Wikipedia (not modern progress) for this change.
Just add {In Space!} to anything.
This is mainly due to the fact that there is no "stable" Wikipedia -- things change so quickly that citing Wikipedia makes it very difficult for anyone to actually look up whatever you were citing. If there were "snapshots" that were widely distributed, say at the end of each year, one could simply cite those snapshots.
There are stable snapshots, and you don't have to wait for the end of the year to get them:
There, you now have an URL to an immutable version of the article as it is when you read it. Even if the base article is edited afterwards, your link will never change.
Dilbert RSS feed
Wikipedia doesn't want original research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:OR and with good reason: the project doesn't want to be in the very difficult position of deciding which experts are actual experts and when experts disagree which one is worth listening to. We're willing to pay the (small) price of having some things need to wait until the experts have put their new research through peer reviewed journals or the like. And that's ok. I'm a math grad student who has done original research. In the process of that I've wrote some Wikipedia articles. At least one of those articles is one where my research improves on known bounds. I haven't added that in because Wikipedia isn't the place for that. When the research gets vetted and published in a peer reviewed journal, I will then go back and add it in.
"one of which is devoted to suggesting that Wikipedia is running out of steam or somehow failing in its mission" comes from
However, while the encyclopaedia continued to expand at a rate of millions of words per month, the number of new articles created each year gradually decreased, from a peak of 665,000 in 2007 to 374,000 in 2010. In response to this slowdown, the Wikimedia Foundation began to focus its expansion efforts on the non-English versions of Wikipedia, which by 2011 numbered more than 250.
"including a suggestion that Wikipedia was a haven for child pornography" comes from
Additionally, in 2010 it was revealed that there was a cache of pornographic images, including illegal depictions of sexual acts involving children, on Wikimedia Commons, a site maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation that served as a repository of media files for use in all Wikimedia products. Although there were no such illegal images on Wikipedia itself, the ensuing scandal prompted Jimmy Wales, who personally deleted many of the Commons files, to encourage administrators to remove any prurient content from Wikimedia sites.
"Everything about the article says, 'parents, keep your children away from this new-fangled, dangerous, unreliable Wikipedia thing!'" probably comes from
[In opening.] Although some highly publicized problems have called attention to Wikipedia’s editorial process, they have done little to dampen public use of the resource, which is one of the most-visited sites on the Internet.
For many observers of these controversies, a troubling difference between Wikipedia and other encyclopaedias lies in the absence of editors and authors who will accept responsibility for the accuracy and quality of their articles. These observers point out that identifiable individuals are far easier to hold accountable for mistakes, bias, and bad writing than is a community of anonymous volunteers, but other observers respond that it is not entirely clear if there is a substantial difference. ... Whether or not Wikipedia has managed to attain the authority level of traditional encyclopaedias, it has undoubtedly become a model of what the collaborative Internet community can and cannot do.
and the fact that the majority of the article discusses controversies and problems.
[I collected these to save others the trouble of hunting through the article for them as I did.]