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."

Comments

The ultimate hipster edition

[casings]

That actually sounds like a really "cool" thing to own.

Re:The ultimate hipster edition

[jhoegl]

Just wait until we live in the post energy Mad Max era of lack of knowledge.
Why, if you owned those, you would be... GOD! Or a washed up singer in charge of some sort of barter town.

Re:The ultimate hipster edition

[Anonymous Coward]

"The Way Things Work" would be a more concise, possibly helpful resource -- albeit I only have an much older edition, which may in fact be more useful as it's mostly related to physical everyday things which could mostly be made using relatively primitive tools.

Losing A Snapshot Of History

[djnanite]

This is quite sad. I obviously prefer my source of knowledge to be up-to-date, and easily accessible, so online encyclopedias make sense. But...I find it quite charming flicking through copies of encyclopedias that are more than 20 years old, seeing a snapshot of our knowledge at the time, and seeing how we've moved on since then. And what library was complete without a complete set of these on their shelves?

Re:Losing A Snapshot Of History

[Anonymous Coward]

Which begs the question : Why didn't the EB take the lead as the premiere on line reference resource? They had the pole position, they had the background process of collecting and cataloging the information, it would have been trivial to create an on line presence. Yet, they didn't. 244 years of diligence, flushed in a single decade. Wow. I guess it's true - having information isn't good enough, you have to know how to use it as well.

Re:Losing A Snapshot Of History

[JoshuaZ]

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.

Re:Citable

[Pharmboy]

You will never be able to cite Wikipedia in a paper without looking foolish. It really isn't designed for that. You CAN use Wikipedia to get an understanding of a topic, and the references they use are usually pretty good and CAN be used as a cite without looking fooling.

Wikipedia is a great tool, but it will never replace paper encyclopedias, by design. Then again, any paper that only cites encyclopedias (paper or otherwise) isn't a good paper. Even Wikipedia requires multiple sources, as should any good paper, for a balance of perspective and confirmation of key points.

Britannica is still around...

[Mindragon]

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.

Bad Joke

[Kaenneth]

How did the hipster burn his mouth?

He ate pizza before it was cool.

best investment

[pinguwin]

I think the best investment my parents ever made in us kids was buying an encyclopedia. I can't tell you how many hours I sat in our library (a room filled with books on two walls and a giant map on the third) reading about all sort of subjects under the sun and subjects far beyond the sun. Lots and lots of time. I would just pick up a volume and open it at random and start reading. So it's kind of sad that the printed version is going away. Once in sixth grade, in response to some knowledge I gleaned from my encyclopedias, said, "Do you just sit around and read encyclopedias!?" I replied, "Yes, I do."

12,000 years from now...

[ZorinLynx]

"Scientists have been wondering why historical records mysteriously ended sometime around the year 2012. It's as if humanity decided to just stop writing things down, and left everything to oral tradition. It's sad that we will never know what happened between then and the eventua downfall of one of the greatest ancient civilizations that ever lived."

Re:Citable

[93 Escort Wagon]

The bottom line is that Wikipedia isn't written by experts, or for the large part by people who have expertise in *any* field, and for topics outside CS and parts of the sciences, it's pretty poor because non-expert "crowds" don't have much judgment. In short-- there's no wisdom in crowds, only amplified ignorance.

That's simply not true. Wikipedia's articles on manga and anime characters are second to none.

George Orwell would approve

[517714]

Lacking written records certainly facilitates revisionist history. I just read online that Encyclopedia Britannica stopped putting out printed editions over 25 years ago. So how is this news? ;-)

Re:Citable

[icebraining]

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:

1. Go to the article you want
2. Click on "View History"
3. Click on the most recent date in the revisions list

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.

Re:Yeah...

[dingo_kinznerhook]

I own a complete set of the 1958 Encyclopedia Americana. I do not own it because it is up-to-date, and I got it for free. I keep it because it reminds me of how quickly the sum of human knowledge changes. Many people would consider this a waste of space for what is only a sentimental reason.

In 1958, this was probably one of the best summaries of human knowledge available.

Wikipedia and Britannica on Each Other

[guttentag]

Wikipedia's Article on Britannica
60 paragraphs on Britannica's history, status, organization, awards, etc. 15 paragraphs on criticisms, bias, racism/sexism. Cites over 100 sources.

Britannica's Article on Wikipedia
2 paragraphs on Origin and Growth (one of which is devoted to suggesting that Wikipedia is running out of steam or somehow failing in its mission), 4 paragraphs on "Issues and controversies," including a suggestion that Wikipedia was a haven for child pornography. Everything about the article says, "parents, keep your children away from this new-fangled, dangerous, unreliable Wikipedia thing!" Cites no sources. What is really amusing is that Britannica's stated slogan (at the top of every page) is "facts matter." I guess attribution does not. Their home page features an image of a 1st-gen iPad with the caption "looking ahead." If Britannica considers 2010 to be the future, that explains a lot.

Re:Wikipedia and Britannica on Each Other

[FrootLoops]

"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.]