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Encyclopedia Britannica Goes To The Free
Cy Guy writes "You can now complete those research papers in half the time for free! EB has incorporated the full text of their dead tree and CD-ROM editions into a portal interface (with the typical web-based email, news headlines, etc.) A search of the Encyclopaedia, also searches "The Best of the Web", Magazines, and Books in Print. The results page also lets you pass your search to Searchopolis. They've released more information about it in the press release.
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If I had any moderator points today I'd give you one. 'Everything' is a step down the right path (it actually has a node / path model, which maps well to existing encyclopediae), but Slash (article / discussion model) is closer, in it's own way. The current moderation / karma system is quite good, and will get better, at showing me the good stuff and letting me ignore the crap.
As high-karma individuals wield more and more power in some hypothetical Encyclopedia Interneta, we will need to be more concerned with identity theft. Reputation management is an emerging technology that will ultimately make massive general knowledge databases useable. If it is compromised, such that any twit can claim to be Stephen Hawking, the value of the compiled information falls quickly.
topic drift: One thing I'd like to see is Karma adjusted by number of posts. People who gain karma by simply posting a whole damn lot, some fraction of which gains them points, should not have the same reputation as people who post once or twice a week, but consistently get moderated up.
-- Jeff Paulsen
Search engines may be getting smarter but by no means do they cover the net completely. Even worse, there is no control of the keywords. A PROFESSIONAL index will include controlling the list of keywords so you will know how to find something. There is no way this can be done on the web.
As far as scope, you have to realize that the goal of the EB is to cover a general body of knowledge completely as possible. With the internet there are large holes where there is no information at all. The Internet contains a tremendous amount of information on matters related to computers, however once you get off that topic and start looking at, say a comparison of greek language dialects you are very likely to come up with zilch on the internet.
What I do say is that along with all the crap out there, you can find primary sources
I think that the internet is very poor for anything to do with primary sources, or even high quality secondary sources. Very few scholarly journals are available on the internet, and certainly even fewer early sources.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
It might make sense to have two kinds of karma: writer's karma and knowledge karma. Knowledgable individuals would be able to review and revise content, but only those with good writer karma get to compose entries. (I'll have to think about the implications of that, this is sort of off the top of my head.) In my experience (I used to write dictionaries before I discovered how little work programming is, a not too dissimilar buisness) the topic experts were usually not the best writers.
Traditionally, material in encyclopedias must come from other printed sources and the encyclopedia editor has to have a long citation list, even if that list isn't printed. That model should remain in place. Even if an expert says something is so-and-so, that doesn't mean it's the accepted wisdom. Encyclopedias are generally about accepted wisdom, not the latest thing.
There still has to be some core group responsible for final editing and meeting deadlines.
Won't this just lead to the end of the Encyclopedia Brittanica?
Maybe. But, remember the speed of the internet, and the number of people likely to be using this at a time, and the speed of most people's access, etc, etc. Think large movies/pictures/etc.
If its just for occasional access, then I'd use this. But if I was a {uni,library,masters/phd student}, then I'd buy the CD (on a site license - I seem to recall they have these), and get faster access for a reasonably minimal price.
Bradley
I don't know what kind of parties you go to, but if they involve encyclopædias they're either really boring or really weird.
According to netcraft, www.eb.com ... which is also the encyclopedia britannica ... is running Netscape Enterprise Server on Solaris.
I think it's a reasonable assumption that www.britannica.com is the same. This doesn't speak badly of Solaris or Netscape, IMO... it's just, that there's nothing quite so spectacularly useful to such a broad cross-section of the population as a free, on-line, high-quality encyclopedia. They may need to increase their capacity, oh... to about a thousand times what it was when they were a pay site.
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
Encyclopedia Britannica has been available :-)
via the WWW since January of 1994.
Of course, until now you've had to pay for the content
www.britannica.com is overloaded, but
if you want to see their existing Britannica
Online (BOL) site, with the same article content, jump to http://www.eb.com/ and sign up for
their trial membership.
Down already...
Sniff sniff, sniff... (thinks)... Micrsoft web server?
I could recognise that smell anywhere. Pity.
Everyone is living in a personal delusion, just some are more delusional than others.
Wow! I just submitted the same story. Looks like I was a little late.
/.'ers did. For it to die at Microsoft's hand would be a crime against nature.
I'm very happy to see EB free on the web. Charging people monthly to use an encyclopedia never struck me as a very viable strategy. The fear I have though is that this bodes badly for those who hope to sell information over the web. If EB can't break even doing it, who can?
Encyclopedias are very expensive to maintain. I'm not at all sure an advertising model can pay for adequate work at all. According to the AP wire article, it looks like Microsoft is the main culprit here - they're very nearly giving away Encarta.
Now, Encarta is crap. Before MS, it was the grocery store quality Funk and Wagnall's Encyclopedia. I would hate to see MS take over yet another industry segment.
The death of Britannica would be a travesty. I grew up with one, and I suspect a lot of other
Perhaps we need an Open Source general encyclopedia to keep the Redmond minions out of this business?
Is it just me or does this seem short sighted? I mean, it's great that there's such free, easy access but how are they going to pay for continuing research to keep it current?
Won't this just lead to the end of the Encyclopedia Brittanica?
My guess is it'll lead to clickthrough sponsorship.
Please help support our sponsors!
Click here to vote for us in the "top 100"!
mcrandello@my-deja.com
rschaar{at}pegasus.cc.ucf.edu if it's important.
The first things I tried to do was: 1) Access the Encyclopaedia Britannica online (had to pay) and 2) visit the Louvres (had to pay too, at the time.) That was a major bummer.
So this is a nice change of pace, and it's about time it came about, too. The simple fact of the matter is, you can't compete against a clever search engine and a modicum of intelligence when it comes to looking for information on the Web.
EB is doing a smart move, and they probably realise they'll make much more money with well-targeted ads than by charging a membership fee. However, I'm not sure if it means the EB won't be obsolete. Its strong point is a variety of expert writeups and a central collection of articles. Its weak points? It's still a book trying to become an Internet knowledge database.
When will we see an "Encyclopaedia Interneta"? A knowledge-oriented, peer-reviewed compendium of human knowledge? How could such a process benefit from the Slashdot model, as seen in the Jane Cyberterrorism story?
I'm certain the key to storing and indexing knowledge is in there somewhere, but I don't think it's been done properly yet. (And I mean no disrespect to Everything. :) )
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
This couldn't be like OSS software projects. Some kind of staff has to have a final, near dictatorial say on what goes in and what doesn't.
You mean like Linus?
Frankly, I might be interested in writing articles even for free. Heck, I was thinking that one thing I wished I'd done was set up an Internet Encyclopedia. The web is a wonderful source of info, but it is scattershot and hard to search. Moreover, there's no easy way to determine age appropriateness; the entry for a six year old should be less in-depth and less technical than that for an adult. if it takes advertizing to hire moderators and organizers, and the writers are ill-paid or unpaid, I can work with that.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Try the The DICT Development Group. They run FILE: The Free Internet Lexicon and Encyclopedia - it's really a dictionary rather than an Encyclopedia, but it is open source, and it is an attempt to fulfill and extend RFC 2229 - A Dictionary Server Protocol.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
Not like they're badly in need on money, but EB's going to make a pretty penny.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
According to the LA Times, the Encyclopedia Brittanica site won't open until Friday. If this is correct, all of you folks are banging on the doors of a site that isn't open for business yet. Frustrating, isn't it. Anticipation can be sweet, relax and enjoy the possibilities.
The web has some serious flaws as a source of information. It is quite haphazard rather than being carefully reviewed for scope and completeness, it has terrible indexing, and most of the surces are not authorataive or reviewed.
It's going to be a long, long time before the web will replace a good library.
I'll try anyway, I'm sure you knew I would.
fifteen years ago my parents didn't buy an encyclopedia for me, they brought me a Spectrum instead and I don't know if they realise what a favour that did me. Information on paper is nice, but expensive. Information on a bitstream hasn't yet found the perfect presentation but it's evolving so quickly that God himself has to be impressed. Who in their right mind would have imagined, when I was playing Manic Miner and giving my uncle nightmares about jumping little white men that we'd have the whole of the encyclopedia available FOR FREE to anyone who was interested enough to read it IN YOUR OWN HOME for the cost of a local telephone call (Plus some overhead which isn't much more than the cost of that Spectrum)?
Nobody. Only the insane.
I find myself lost for words when I'm trying to explain to someone who's never done anything but look at corporate websites over a slow connection just what potential this medium of ours has. We really can change everything. We can give low cost education to anyone who wants it. We can supply documentation on anything people need documentation on. We can elucidate on any proplems anyone has understanding and IT ALL COSTS ALMOST NOTHING.
The distributed model works so well it scrambles my brain. One intelegent person can now reach thousands without even trying. And those thousands will listen becasue they're not as dumb as the traditional media (and myself at times) gives them credit for and even if they are a proper distributed moderation system sorts out the bullshit from the opinion from the truth more easily than any editor.
People have also mentioned Everything and I guess H2G2 will get there if they give up on human editors soon enough. How long will it be before I can type "Nutritional chicken feed" into google and practically immediately learn how to nurse my sick hen into health, probably getting a joke or two thrown in?
- You want info? - It's free.
- You want Music? - It's free.
- You want Software? - It's Free!
- You want Movies - Give it a year, tops.
The only problem people have that gives me any cause for concern at all is how all this stuff will get made when it's free for distribution.they say. That does worry me a little, especially with Movies which are EXPENSIVE to say the least, but I look at the software scene which people said the same things about and I look at MP3.COM and I look at news like this (It used to cost over a thousand and now it's FREE) and just figure that most talented people are vain enough that they don't need the money and that society wants to reward these people enough that they will get rewarded. And contributing to a properly distributed system so so inexpensive that people DO do it on their own time for nothing more than the desire to make things better.
The whole idea of information wanting to be free and people helping it to do so for no better reason than whim and a desire to enrich people with what they know: To TEACH gives me pause with my pessmism. It's about the only thing that does.