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Wikipedia Didn't Kill Brittanica — Encarta Did
rudy_wayne writes "The end of Encyclopedia Britannica has been widely reported and its demise has been blamed on Wikipedia. However, this article at Wired points out that the real reason is something entirely different. 'In 1990 Britannica had $650 million in revenue. In 1996, long before Wikipedia existed, it was bankrupt and the entire company was sold for $135 million. What happened in between was Encarta. Even though Encarta didn't make money for Microsoft and Britannica produced its own encyclopedia CDs, Encarta was an inexpensive, multimedia encyclopedia that helped Microsoft sell Windows PCs to families. And once you had a PC in the living room or den where the encyclopedia used to be, it was all over for Mighty Britannica. It's not that Encarta made knowledge cheaper, it's that technology supplanted its role as a purchasable 'edge' for over-anxious parents. They bought junior a new PC instead of a Britannica. When Wikipedia emerged five years later, Britannica was already a weakened giant. It wasn't a free and open encyclopedia that defeated its print edition. It was the personal computer itself.'"
It's nice to finally see a slashdot article that blames Microsoft for something.
I still have my Encarta CDs. Does that mean I'm harboring a murderer?
[citation needed]
Have gnu, will travel.
LOL, he sure has your number.
I remember being at a trade fair of some sort shortly after Encarta came out. I had a copy and immediately saw that multimedia versions would eventually kill the paper version.
So I asked the Brittanica rep when they would have their electronic version out, and the attitude was literaly "its a passing fad, people we will always want the book version".
I think that phrase "its a passing fad" should almost qualify as investment advice. take a hard look at the passing fads, and buy in early! or even better, short the company that claims their threat is a passing fad.
I doubt this. Encarta wasn't all that useful to me when it could have been. I still went to paper encyclopedias or used search engines. Now wikipedia has replaced both avenues. But Encarta wasn't even on the list. I looked at it a few times and couldn't take ti seriously as a resource.
Microsoft first plan was to produce a digital Encyclopedia Brittanica, but the guys at "Encyclopedia Brittanica" declined, therefore they Brittanica killed Birttanica.
Source: I'm old and I remember that happening.
It was Mosaic and other web browsers that sold PCs from 1993 onward, not Encarta.
I know that's why I bought my first PC (the old 68000 Amiga Mosaic had become too slow for the web), and it's why everyone I knew was buying PCs..... they wanted web access. All the information is available through a search engine.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I'd argue that the trimph of verifiability over truth - a maxim of many governments but not reaching the West until the propaganda machines of the '80s - was what killed Britannica (speling?).
"Over-anxious parents", being newspeak for "parents who like their children to have a broad understanding of the world", didn't switch to Encarta - they simply stopped existing. Kids were not primed from an early age toward manufacture or thought, whether as a supervising engineer or the guy sitting on the assembly line. Instead, the bright, motivated child would be taught that his position in society was to make a lot of money, stand back and to let the wealth trickle down. In such an environment, what matters is not what is true, but what you can convince other people to be true.
Maybe if you bought one you would know at least how to spell its name. It's “Britannica”, for your information.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I would argue that Encarta, rather than supplanting encylopedia's in people's houses showed how unnecessary they are (which was confirmed by Wikipedia).
I confess to buying a couple of copies of Encarta, looking through them and seeing that they were okay - not as good as a set of Encyclopedia Britannica but you could toodle around and look up stuff. But, I was always disappointed in Encarta's depth of information as well as the limited pictures and videos (which were why you were supposed to buy the darn thing in the first place). So, it fell into disuse pretty quickly and the kids used the library for their projects (which is arguably where they should have been doing it in the first place). People got out of the habit of looking to an encyclopedia in the home.
Then along came Wikipedia which really fulfills the promise of a computer based encylopedia with links to images, videos, references you could cite/confirm, etc. which reduced an encyclopedia's usefulness to just being raw materials for quirky leather bound furniture.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
If only Britannica would have patented cataloging a large amount of factual information in an indexed fashion...
For the time, both Microsoft Encarta and Microsoft Dinosaurs were pretty cool products. I've still got the CDs somewhere, although they don't do much on my Mac.
Now the upselling-bait-and-switch tactics Microsoft tried to pull on us Encarta customers was quite another matter, and was one of a long line of things that eventually led to my flight from the Windows platform. But the products themselves were both fun and useful.
#DeleteChrome
If you dig deeper it's really the PC itself that killed paper encyclopedias. In addition to Encarta there was suddenly online access to search engines and research resources. Combine this with the ease of copy/paste and word processing and you had a pretty decent research center and paper writing tool. The encyclopedia was certainly a status symbol, but now you had the newfangled "personal computer" to show off. So Encarta was part of it, but I think the blame (credit) really is with the PC.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Depite the headline on TFS, TFA (and even the body of TFS) says the PC displaced the print encyclopedia, not that electronic encyclopedias, or any particular one of them, did. Encarta is mentioned as one factor that helped Microsoft promote the Windows PC in this niche, but the contention isn't that Encarta displaced Britannica as a source of knowledge but that the personal computer displaced the print encyclopedia as a parental purchase.
Brittanica's death isn't Microsoft's fault in the slightest. Brittanica realised that digital was the way forward so looking back, at least they got something right but Encarta just wasn't good enough. Wikipedia's model makes much more sense in our modern day internet world where people collaborate information and make decisions democratically. It's their own fault for executing the move to digital poorly.
Hmmm, I've seen this situation somewhere else in the world...
Not everyone had internet acces in 1993.... I didn't get online until 1998.
Before that (1998), we had two copies of Encarta. I had the first version for Windows 95/3.1 and then Encarta 97. I thought it was cool hearing the sounds a dolphin made on my computer in the first version of Encarta. I got hooked on it and would look through its articles and pictures. I even used it many times for my school work before I learned to use the Internet.
Encarta was an essential software bundle for the home PC for families during the mid 90s.
Previewing comments are for sissies!
nope, it's not that computers supplanted our need to read books. it's that there's only so much money in the family (or school) budget, and if you're shelling out $600-$1000 for a pc, you don't have that money available to spend on a bunch of books that you know are just going to get dusty and sit around waiting to become outdated.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
...I miss the Bill Gates of Borg icon.
You were just bitching that they should get rid of that logo two weeks ago.
I tried to by Britannica CD in 90s. They were charging almost as much as paper edition. It was only in early 2000s when they realized the error of their ways.
They could have sewn up the encyclopedia market but their high price was unjustifiable in the light of substantially cheaper offerings such as Encarta.
Sure, Encarta is not as good as Britannica but it's good enough for most kids. This is the key point: good enough is the enemy of perfect.
Encarta was crap, Wikipedia is a phenomenal source of information and I routinely donate to support Wikipedia.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Encyclopedia Brittanica is not gone, just the PRINT version. They do have digital offerings.
I remember being a kid begging my parents to Brittanica only to hear over and over again that they couldn't afford it.
Only rich elite kids could afford the Brittanica.
The new one, the last one is a bit pricey for individuals, though certainly worth it for institutions:
Encyclopaedia Britannica - The Final Print Edition $1,395.00
and now that I think of it I never finished reading the one my parents got for me when I was in elementary school.
Cheers,
adric
<script>alert("I never liked JavaScript, really; it just seemed a bad idea.");</script>
I bought the software version of Britannica about 10 years back and the interface was terrible (relied on IE3 plugins IIRC).
If they would have produced a really good software package I think they would have had more adoption of it.
From reviews of the current version, they are still facing software problems (including registering the software so you can access updates, etc.).
According to wikipedia, Compton's was the first multimedia CD-ROM encyclopedia. I think we had a copy of it, too.
Video killed the radio star. Details at 11
I remember being in the Military and we had Britanica salesmen on the military base trying to sell Encycopedias. I remember a buddy of mine proudly displaying his set in his Barracks room. I must admit they were a handsome set. I made mention to him why did you buy those heavy books? They are getting ready to go digital in a few years.
Oh well.
I bought a bootleg Britannica CD somewhere in a green field. It insisted I use some ancient browser, so I did. Still there, still works well off CD. But now I go to Wikipedia first - surprise! If the topic is recondite enough, what I read is out-of-copyright Britannia; serious, seminal text.
Now I have a (store-boughten) later Britannia, but unlike the bootleg CD it is not text-only, has bells and whistles, and confuses - Fail. There's a missed opportunity somewhere in there.
OED to note, please. Only just got it to work on Win7, no Mac, no Linux, now what?
Even though my family owned a full set of Encyclopedia Brittanica and Comptons, I don't feel too bad for them. EB later turned out to be a Patent Troll. I used to work for one of the Defendants in their bizzare lawsuits on GPS manufacturers. http://thepriorart.typepad.com/the_prior_art/2008/11/encyclopaedia-britannica-patent-lawsuit.html Apparently, if you search a CD you are stealing their IP or something.
MindMaze did.
I still hate that jester :(
But it didn't even have to be Encarta or any electronic encyclopedia that did it.
The market for encyclopedias at that time was probably almost exactly the same market for PCs, middle-class families willing to make a large one-time expenditure to help with their kids future (or their own).
The PC was new and held the same promise that it would inform and educate your kids so they could grow up to be smarter and more successful. The fact that something like Encarta was available for it was simply icing on the cake, but people would probably have chosen the cake anyway.
The Encyclopedia was old-and-busted and the PC was teh-new-hotness and their customers could only afford one or the other. Sure, rich people could buy both, but that wasn't how EB made their money. They sold "the larger world and knowledge and the future" to greater middle-class america, and the computer was those things made incarnate and so I suspect everyone who had a nagging feeling that maybe an Encyclopedia would be something they should buy replaced it with a nagging feeling that they really ought to buy a computer, and the rest is as they say, history.
G.
I think most of information in the summary can also be found here: :-)
- Encarta
- Encyclopædia Britannica
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I think that phrase "its a passing fad" should almost qualify as investment advice. take a hard look at the passing fads, and buy in early! or even better, short the company that claims their threat is a passing fad.
Brittanica likely suffered from the same internal conflict of interest that contributed to the demise of Polaroid and Kodak. Individuals within the companies may have had the foresight to understand what was about to happen, but encountered two different types of roadblock. The Britannica rep was a good example of the first type.
The second type though, was the more lethal one -- a management that did understand the threat, but whose primary concern was ensuring that the company did not end up competing with itself. By the time they were forced by external forces, it was already too late.
Find some old encyclopedias, A set from each of the following years: 1920, 1930, 1940, 1950, 1960 and so on
Look up the following in each set:
Israel
Communist
Transistor
Ku Klux Klan
Nazi
Steel
In 1993 computers were still disgustingly expensive ($2000+ with a monitor), and that was for a 386 that would choke on anything but text pages (in terms of online rendering). Modems were still incredibly slow and internet providers outside academia were incredibly hard to come by (most people used AOL). In this time period people were mostly buying computers, recognizing that they couldn't do anything fun without upgrading to a CD-ROM and a sound card, and upgrading with a Multimedia kit and playing The Seventh Guest and mucking around on Encarta (included in most upgrade kits).
You're thinking of the time frame of 1996 onwards, when people actually had more powerful processors to choose from (486 or Pentium-based PCs), faster modems became inexpensive (14.4 and faster), and real consumer internet providers began to surface.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Britannica (however its spelled) was also somewhat of a novelty. My parents bought a set. And I looked at it a lot because it was there. Much the same way early TV was also incredibly attracting. I would watch every TV science show on, and if nothing was on, read the big books on just about any science article.
I will agree with a few points above, I don't think Encarta was soley responsible, but it was the PC in general, or more specifically, time. TV is no longer a novelty, britannica is no longer a novelty, PCs are no longer a novelty, pretty soon tablets will not be a novelty.
What's the money maker? what will be the next FAD that obsoletes everything else?
With a bit of inside humor, I'm guessing it's GIT.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
I was acquainted with some people at Britannica in the 80s and 90s, and others in publishing (not well enough acquainted to be a leak, just to form an opinion that might have value). It seemed to me that Britannica was stuck on being the encyclopedia that everyone wished they could afford, rather than the encyclopedia that everyone used. Similar things happened in other domains where the effective price point changed suddenly. You go from being the dominant choice in a small but expensive market to being almost nobody's choice in a much larger and much cheaper market.
I think that it's the same phenomenon that killed Apollo. They had the best (pretty much only) desktop research computer workstation, only affordable by very well funded labs. SUN Microsystems offered a much cheaper, inferior box, running a UNIX that was not yet as well engineered as the Apollo proprietary system. But the new, cheaper box, and the preponderance of UNIX on research minicomputers, provided a UNIX solution for almost everybody. Soon, even those who could afford Apollo found it more effective to buy lots of UNIX instead of a little bit of Apollo. I remember an almost tearful Apollo engineer, toward the end, promising that they were finally going to provide UNIX and cut their price. It was too late.
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
This article is very true. At the time Encarta came out I was working for a company that sold PCs. We were located in an area where there were many affluent African American families. Not being raciest by any means, but typically all we had to do was bring up the article on Martin Luther King and start the "dream" speech video and they just had to have that for their kids. Encarta sold the computer.
load "linux",8,1
If only Britannica would have patented cataloging a large amount of factual information in an indexed fashion...
They did. And then they became a patent troll and sued dozens of companies. Any then they lost and never recovered any money.
http://thepriorart.typepad.com/the_prior_art/2008/11/encyclopaedia-britannica-patent-lawsuit.html
http://www.brinkshofer.com/news_events/2571-federal-circuit-affirms-summary-judgment-brinks-client-alpine-encyclopaedia
Which I grabbed opportunistically at a library sale.
It calls itself "A New Survey of Universal Knowledge," and the founding date of 1768 is easier to find than the revision date.
Israel, quoted in entirety: "ISRAEL, the national designation of the Jews. The Hebrew name means "God strives" or "rules" (see Gen. xxxii. 28; and the allusion in Hosea xii. 4). It was borne by their ancestor, Jacob, the father of the 12 tribes. For some centuries the term was applied to the northern kingdom, as distinct from Judah, although the feeling of national unity extended it so as to include both."
Communist: no entry. There is an entry of 2+ pages on "COMMUNISM, a term often loosely used to denote different systems of social organization aiming at common property of the means of production, or at an equal distribution of weath and income, or at both. ..." The bulk of the article refers to the Russian revolution and subsequent communist government. It is fairly free with the author's negative opinion of Russian communism.
Ku Klux Klan: about 1 page. "KU KLUX KLAN. There have been two distinct organizations of this name in American history. The first Ku Klux Klan was an outgrowth of the tense feeling in the South during the reconstruction period succeeding the Civil War; the second was organized during the World War and attained is greatest strength in the period of social and economic readjustment which followed the restoration of peace. ..." I find this article more objective in tone than the one on communism. It refers to the "scalawags" and "carpet baggers," and appears to accept the view of an over-reaching reconstruction, and refers to the first Klan as "a more or less successful revolution against the reconstruction and an overthrow of the governments based on negro suffrage or 'Carpetbag' government."
Nazi: about 1/3 page. "NAZI, a popular abbreviation for a member of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Workingmen's party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, commmonly designated by its initials, NSDAP). ..." More objective in tone than the article on Communism, similar in tone to the one on Ku Klux Klan. I can't resist the last sentence: "Today, just as Christians draw their faith from the Bible and the words of Jesus, so Nazis find the expression of their faith and beliefs in Hitler's book,My Battle (Mein Kampf), and in his speeches and decrees."
Steel: only a reference to subsections. "STEEL: see Iron and Steel; Wire Rope; Bessemer Steel; Structural Engineering; Open Hearth Steel; High Speed Steel; Manganese Steel; Molybdenum Steel; Mushet Steel; Nickel Steel; Nickel Chromium Steel; Tool Steel; Tungsten Steel; Vanadium Steel; Nitrogen Hardening; Stainless Steel; Steels, Alloy; Alloys; Pressed Metal; Sheets, Iron and Steel; and other specific headings." "STEELS, ALLOY" covers more than 3 pages.
Transistor: no entry. I really checked, just to be sure. One should always confirm the obvious, since the surprise value of a contradiction would be so great. The enclopedia goes from "TRANSFORMER" (the electrical kind) directly to "TRANSIT CIRCLE or MERIDIAN CIRCLE." (Notice that I quoted the previous and following entries sorta like a DNS response for a nonexistent entry.)
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
The death of the encyclopedia is similar to the death of the dictionary and thesaurus: Nothing replaced these things, they simply lost utility to the average person. We no longer need to look up big words because the way we communicate with a small diction is sufficient; we no longer need a general knowledge reference like print or even online encyclopedias because the average person rarely makes reference to such knowledge anymore. Chemists have chemistry books, lawyers have law books, etc. etc. knowledge is specialized. 50 years ago, 70 years ago, hell 200 years ago it was fashionable to know a lot of general things about a lot of general things. Today, it's just not the case. It's not the PC that did this. It's fashion. It's natural selection.
The problem really comes down to the fact you can only cut and paste once from books!
By 10th grade we weren't allowed to cite encyclopedias ... had to have Primary Sources.
But I have a report due on space...
texting did
Internet also killed it.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Who will kill Wikipedia? It is going to happen. Who and when?
Regardless of what the founder believes, Wikipedia should have monetized the website with the "subtle" use of advertising which would have generated billions in revenue over the past decade.
Wikipedia could have then bought Brittanica/Encarta and re purposed the authors and developers to write decent articles, perform fact finding research, and moderate articles to help improve the site. It would have been win-win for both: Brittanica would have entered a new era of real time information and Wikipedia would have gained valuable resources to improve content.
Instead, Brittanica is now bankrupt and the founder of Wikipedia begs for change yearly to run his website.
I don't find Wikipedia particularly good. It lacks rich content and interactivity, is woefully poor on facts and most articles are purely subjective. Its a glorified blog, period. The website is run on a dollar store budget and lacks any real innovation and the website has been stagnant for a decade.
Bottom line is, someone had a good idea 10 years ago and has done nothing since to expand, improve, or re-invigorate that idea.
I don't care for what moral purpose the founder of Wikipedia chose not to monetize Wikipedia; Google never charged people a dime and provided what today would be considered essential services to the Internet. So why the hell couldn't Wikipedia? Even if the founder gave all his money away (and honestly, isn't giving millions to charity BETTER then begging for change?), just keep enough money to run your website and re-invest back in evolving and innovating.
When I see those stupid beg "ads" and long diatribes about what wonderful service Wikipedia provides to the world it is just a reminder to all that an idiot with morals is still an idiot.
I think if you look up "clown" in Wikipedia, the founder's face should probably be shown. He killed the competition full of rich, "factful" content in place of a dollar store product that won't evolve because of cheap and lazy development and a founder that has tunnel vision. He is a one hit wonder that has taken far to much credit and not given anything back.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
... , because the one thing you really want when buying a shelf of useless books is even more useless books to litter your coffee table.
I really cannot think of any occasion where the two-paragraph overview from a printed encyclopedia ever helped me accomplish anything. If I needed to study something specific, I went to the library and borrowed a few books on the topic. Encyclopedias are what you read when you don't really care all that much about the subject.
I pity anyone whose knowledge of the pre-web role of encyclopedias is limited to the poster's comment.
In 1968, my parents acquired a set of Enclopaedia Britannica ( == Yes that is the correct spelling). This was just prior to my experiencing a soccer injury that would confine me to bed for most of the next two years. I spent most of that time reading EB. (Yes, I also went to the library every week.) My time with EB did more to prepare me for college than any other single aspect of my high school education.
(And I came from a household that housed more than a thousand books and multiple sets of competing encyclopedias as well.)
Your "two paragraph" assertion is misleading. I still remember reading a biography of Rene Descarte that went on for pages. The article on World War II was even longer. Also, encyclopedias were never meant to be one's only source of information. Just a "jumping off" point in case the reader needed a starting point. This is the same way Wikipedia is used today. Need basic information? Use Wiki. Need more? That is what the iPad, Kindle, Nook, and the library are for.
Many years later, EB became one of my clients. It was during that experience that I learned that almost every article was written by a college professor likely to be an authority on the subject and proofread by another prior to publication. That many articles were also written by experts in their field (i.e. Albert Einstein authored an article on Physics in one edition) is also overlooked by the poster.
When my own daughters needed a resource in the early eighties, I did buy the Encarta, Grolier, and much later, the Britannica discs. In the internet age, my sons have no need for any of these.
But just to rant because one did not sit still, read, and appreciate this wonderful resource for what it was, is more a reflection on the poster and less a reflection on the value of such tools prior to the internet.
'nuff said.
Live Long and Prosper - Thanks Leonard. You are missed.
My family had a computer for years (the first was a 286 around 1987) and about 1992 bought a fancy new 486 from Gateway. It was an even bigger day when Dad got us a 4X CD-ROM drive to replace the 1X that the computer came with. About the time we switched to Windows 95, Dad bought a copy of Encarta. Over the next few years, one or two more versions were purchased. We also got a copy of Encyclopaedia Britannica (don't ask me when) and one of something made by Grolier before the acquistion by Scholastic. My parents weren't against large volumes of printed references (they own a condensed OED) but Dad saw the potential of the CD format (DVD as well) right away. The fact that Encarta was much cheaper was a bonus.
Why does nobody simply puts forward the point that those huge dead tree encyclopedias suck. Sure, they have some in-depth articles on key subjects, but search for something more precise (like 2 words with a different meaning than each single one) and you won't find it in there. I remember trying to find things in EB in the 80s and stopping in frustration (I also had a Larousse encyclopedic dictionnary which was much better).
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Interesting post.
However, I'm going with the cliche and saying it was Wikipedia. Encarta damaged the revenue stream. But with Encarta Encyclopedia Britannica was still widely hailed as by far the most comprehensive encyclopedia with the longest and best articles. It was Wikipedia that changed that by becoming equally large and then twice and then 20x and now more like 100x the size of Britannica. Wikipedia as this point has better articles on most subjects than specialized encyclopedias. And had the deletionists not seized control in 2007, Wikipedia would probably be at least an order of magnitude larger than it is.
Britannica could, until Wikipedia, have moved to a different model. Say for example bundling an entire information service that was sold by subscription, that was available on cell phones, that was included in all schools and libraries. What they couldn't do if find any reason to get huge amounts of money once something that was better in most respects was free.
Britannica has competed with cheaper encyclopedias before, like World Book and beat them. Heck they themselves owned Comptons.
So, fascinating opinion but I stick with the cliche.
Encarta was a POS. If it killed anything it must have been almost dead anyway. If it is guilty of anything it is of wasting a perfectly good CD. My parents got if for me when I was in high school in the 90's, I think it got used twice before collecting dust on a shelf someplace. I would rather look something up in a book.
If ANYTHING killed Brittanica it was the fact that households didn't need their own personal library for use anymore. The public system of libraries got good enough that people could simply visit their local library and you know, read a real book on a subject, rather than the 3 sentence blurb that Brittanica would give you. Heck if the library didn't have it, they could order it from another one in the same network...
Anyway I am sure the publishers would love to use THAT as an argument of why libraries are evil, and sharing books is bad and reduces innovation etc...
The quickest way to get laughed out of higher education ...
I laugh at "higher" education.
DIODE: 1 sentence.
TRIODE: nothing.
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
Where is the (offline) encyclopedia for tablets? Encarta, Britannica, whatever... I see the "concise" version of Britannica in the Android App store (stupid "Play" rebranding crap!), but nothing else, except a bunch of web browser front-ends calling themselves "Wikipedia reader[s]".
Come on! A tablet (or phone) is a much better fit for the bookshelf than a desktop PC, much better for kid/elderly use, much nicer to read than a non-portable and noisy desktop (or semi-portable and still noisy laptop), and has the added bonus of fitting perfectly into the model of THHGTTG.
With 32GB MicroSDHC cards everywhere, there should be more than enough space, and with decent tablets going for $35 in India, ($70 for the rest of the world--see ubislate, or others), it should be an imminently practical option. Instead, a random web search, or the low-quality crap that is Wikipedia, is all we get. I'm sure brick and mortar libraries would love to have this as an option... a REAL reference in a tiny and cheap form factor, not the random crap you get from a web search.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
in 1989, when I bought my copy of EB, I was already using computer based reference material, and I pointed this stuff out to the EB salesman, he said he would ask and came back with the answer "they are looking into it". CD based reference stuff was already entering the market, and with animation and cheap updates it was obvious then that EB had to change, or die. I'd give some credit to Encarta, but only as part of a major shift towards software based reference material.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
So, I reread the NAZI entry carefully. It doesn't mention the Nazi accession to power, nor the war. It says that "Two points [of the original Nazi program] are still blocked by Germany's neighbors: the union of all Germans (outside of Germany) and more land, including colonies."
After supper, I'll check out entries on Germany and other things relating to the war, and hunt harder for the date of real compilation of the articles. I'm not sure whether I have the stamina to type in the whole 1/3 of a page on "NAZI," but this is getting real interesting ...
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
Spelling nazi here. I think you mean "in-depth" knowledge. Now you owe me.
I read through all the head matter, and found no details on the timeliness of the material. The "Editor's Preface" brags about the timeliness ("the Britannica is never old"), but gives no careful details. Individual articles have no dates.
The edition with the 1946 copyright has an article on "WORLD WAR II" mentioning dates all the way up to the Japanese surrender "On Sept. 2, 1945." It mentions that "U.S. armed forces began to land ... to assume their occupation duties."
The KU KLUX KLAN entry mentions "the World War," but it didn't need to be updated after the destruction of the 2d Klan. The WORLD WAR II entry has information on the Nazi party more timely than the information in the NAZI entry. But the NAZI entry does not cite any other article for more information.
I still like djl's longtitudinal comparison idea a lot (some other entries, eh? ...), but the skew between different entries makes it more complicated. We're getting a snapshot of the presentation of a given topic before a given time, distorted by the priority with which it was revised. Lovely problem in signal separation. I wonder whether the bad odor surrounding the Nazi party was strong enough to make neglect preferable to revision. It will (assuming someone posts it) be interesting to compare to later NAZI entries.
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
Wikipedia NOR Britannica are citable sources. EVER. Nor any other encyclopedia.
This is not entirely true: entries in some encyclopedias are credited with specific authors, and in some cases do represent a citable opinion, or even citable, factual results of research. These "entries" are essentially "articles." This is not true for Britannica or Wikipedia, but is true for many, many encyclopedias in many fields.
The problem of citation in encyclopedias, wikipedia, and even the web at large, is that of authority. If you can't trace the author, then you have no way of evaluating the authority and validity of the cited text.
Absolutely true and should have been the story angle in the first place if slashdot wasn't trolling for page views. We're geeks. Why do we put up with this? Too often this place flirts with becoming People magazine or Entertainment Tonight, where the game is to scandalize the most banal information ever promulgated between living organisms.
So let me add my own story, circa 1986. I walk up to a Britannica booth in a local shopping mall and ask with the clarity of youth: "When is the CD version coming out?" The sales guy hisses at me like Voldemort. This is a decade before Encarta enters the picture. All you needed was a working brain to see that 600MB on a silver disc was a fatal illness. Britannica was cancering for a decade before Encarta metastasized.
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One thing history has in common with the printed edition(but not with the online), it doesn't change...
2010 might be the end of a static-snapshot of history; now history can be reinterpreted to the end of time...
While it's important to re-analyse history, we have to be careful not to re-colour that interpretation(with modern ideals); have you ever read an old edition? The historical interpretation and context is almost as important as the events themselves.
It tells us about what our society was like, how we reacted to the events that have led up to it, and gives us a reference point to appreciate how much we've changed.
Are we one step closer to an Orwellian future?
I don't buy books about software. There are a few exceptions: K&R's C programming language is valuable, 40 years later. But its a very rare exception. I have a book on HTML. I think version 4.01. Good enough. I bought a book about Drupal (version 7). It came out 18 months before version 7. Its about half wrong. Anywhere they tell you to 'click on this and that' is a lie. This and that are on other screens or have been removed. The other problem is rapid development. Its great, and awful. I love new features and improvements. Documentation is usually a blurb written on a website somewhere. The best you can get is a wiki, (and take that with a grain of salt). A book is a historical snapshot. Its too slow. It is either like the Drupal book I bought, where they guessed badly where Drupal would land (they thought screen development had been finalized although there are a lot of places where they say 'get the idea, but don't follow too closely'), or they hit it right on the nose, and the book is great for two weeks... and gets dated fast after that. Britannica couldn't match the speed of the web. There are billions of terabytes of information that can describe through hundreds of pages, more information on any topic, than they could deliver in their entire volume. CD's and DVD's of their books are also cheaper to produce, distribute and access than paper. Heavy equipment manuals have looked like 120mm (4.7244") disks for a long time. Updates are lighter, cheaper, and can be salvaged even if you drop them in mud.
I got Encarta (maybe it was a lite version) bundled with my first laptop, that'd have been about 1996.
I think I still have the CD somewhere. I'll dig it out and see how many planets it thinks there are.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I spent about 5 years working on Encarta in the 1990s in the UK. The technology and bells and whistles were really gimcrack then. They were literally making it up as they went along - editing in some awful fork of Access that crashed all the time. I rewrote a lot of the articles myself for the UK/non-US global edition! And the further reading, etc, was sacrificed at the last minute when the Internet came along, needing hyperlinks. Had a ferocious turnaround schedule. Pioneering days, though.