Is Britannica Confronting Wikipedia?
April 21, 2008
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Is Britannica Confronting Wikipedia?
Yesterday afternoon the CNET News.com News Blog ran an interesting post by Zoë Slocum, which seems to involve an effort on the part of Encyclopaedia Britannica to challenge Wikipedia for Web eyeballs:
The popularity of free, anyone-can-edit Wikipedia has made academia’s battle against encyclopedia referencing–and the publishing industry’s efforts to sell reference material–tougher than ever. Encyclopaedia Britannica, which has embraced e-mail marketing to keep its hardback business in, well, business (I’ve received several promotional messages in the past few months), is now making Web moves to take back its authoritative presence in the industry.
The publisher’s Britannica WebShare initiative, launched April 13 with Twitter streaming of a daily topic, announced on Friday a service called Britannica Widgets, with which bloggers can “post an entire cluster of related Encyclopaedia Britannica articles” for free.
Britannica also is offering “people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, Webmasters, or writers,” free access to Britannica’s online content, with registration.
A couple of hours after this post appeared, reader Philips responded with the inevitable comment under the title “Who cares?” To avoid being accused of distortion, I shall reproduce this comment in its entirety:
In modern Internet, Wikipedia is The Encyclopedia.
Britannica might be more accurate or something, but unfortunately, Wikipedia links to Internet, while Britannica links only to itself.
End result is that bias of Wikipedia is very easy to spot and to check. Spotting bias or inaccuracy in Britannica? - well, good luck.
If nothing else, Wikipedia is good starting point for any research. Britannica will need years and years to integrate with Internet where more or less all information turned out to be.
This is the sort of language (I hesitate to say “reasoning”) that makes excellent reinforcement for Andrew Keen’s “cult of the amateur” arguments. It is rare to find a piece of text in which each sentence is saturated with misconception, but it provides a good opportunity to address what the Encyclopaedia Britannica has become in recent years and why that evolution may be more important to us than the radically more rapid growth of Wikipedia.
The most important part of that evolution is that the Encyclopaedia Britannica has become far more than a very large number of well-written (and edited) articles by authoritative sources all alphabetized by topic and internally cross-referenced. (Note, however, that those attributes of authorial and editorial quality and authority should be sufficient to differentiate it from Wikipedia, notwithstanding the conflicting opinions of Mary Spicuzza and Nicholson Baker.) All of those articles still constitute the “heart” of the Britannica; but that “heart,” known as the “Micropaedia,” is only one of three basic elements. What Wikipedia does not offer (and probably sees no reason to do so) are the other two elements. One is a “Propaedia,” which is basically an outline of all the knowledge covered by the “Micropaedia,” thus providing a structural framework for the entire contents, which, for example, facilitates identifying related topic areas not explicitly mentioned in the “Micropaedia” entries. The other is the “Macropaedia,” which is a collection of expository articles intended to provide a “big picture” view of a topic area to be read before digging into the details of the “Micropaedia.” (By the way the hyperlinks for these three elements are all Wikipedia entries!)
At the risk of sounding too reductive, I would suggest that Wikipedia has become one of the better ways to get straightforward answers to straightforward questions; but, if you really want to learn about something (particularly something highly unfamiliar to you), you need the kind of resource that the full Britannica package provides. Now I have no idea whether or not this whole package is covered by what Britannica now plans to make available for free to a blogger like myself. That is why I just submitted my registration for the service and hope to report on my pleasures and/or disappointments with what I find!
Hmmmmm. I think you’d be hard pressed to trust any article in Wikipedia that, for example, touches on political issues.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Comment moderated due to possible pending legal action, sorry Admin
Regardless of what may have been redacted from Radnik’s comment, I think there are still a couple of more neutral points that can be made. One concerns the “inertia” of reference sources; and the other deals with what to do about “volatile” content. Let me take them in that order.
Through our “cultural memory,” we have come to view an encyclopedia as a relatively STATIC reference. True, the Britannica publishers have long issued their BOOK OF THE YEAR “ADDENDA;” but we tend to consult an encyclopedia for things that DON’T CHANGE, rather than for “keeping up with the latest.” This is a problematic premise, since just about any subject area is ALWAYS changing due to advance scholarship. This can occur on the micro level (a cantata attributed to Bach later found to have been composed by Telemann) or the macro level (as in scientific theories that assign to information the same fundamental priority assigned to matter and energy). When the macro level involves a major shift in world-view (akin to Kuhn’s paradigm shift), that would entail more than “surface-level” emendations in an encyclopedia, while is why there have been essays and books about “the encyclopedia” for at least the last fifty years. Perhaps we are now comfortable enough with the fluidity of such world-views that we can accept the limited value of such static reference sources.
If we can accept fluidity, then we should also be able to accept volatility. At the very least we can use the Internet to make sure that we never have to be informed by a single source (at least when the information is critical to some aspect of our lives). CAVEAT LECTOR has been a recurring theme on my own blog:
http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2008/03/predatory-practices-on-internet.html
There is a much greater risk in being a “casual reader” than there used to be; but we are well-equipped to deal with that risk. The good news is that on Wikipedia a reader can consult the discussion tab to get some sense as to how volatile the content is and adopt appropriate reading habits accordingly.