Britannica, Wikipedia and General Reference
I’ve been a contributor to open source projects, an employee of Encyclopædia Britannica, and an observer (and occasional contributor) to Wikipedia for several years now. Over the years, I’ve noticed a number of misconceptions that Wikipedians have about Britannica, that Britannicians have about Wikipedia, and that the public at large seems to have about both and Wikipedia and Britannica, and general reference sources as a category.
Over the coming weeks, I’m going to attempt to address some of these misconceptions in a series of blog posts. As I do, I’ll update this post with links the subsequent entries, so that this post can serve as a sort of index of related entries.
- Wikipedia is not open source - 11 October 2005
- On Vandalism - 24 October 2005
Hey, this sounds interesting.I am really looking forward to a) see your blog posts on these issues and b) discover ways to fix them.
Comment by Mahtias Schindler — October 5, 2005 @ 11:53 am
Elephant
Der Eblogger hat heute in einem Posting angekündigt, auf “misconceptions” in einer Serie eingehen zu wollen, die zwischen Wikipedia, Britannica und der allgemeinen Öffentlichkeit herrschen. Ich freue mich auf diese Postings und werde sie…
Trackback by Work in Progress — October 5, 2005 @ 12:07 pm
Three cheers for this initiative! Perhaps we can find a way to craft a similar set of observations from the symmetric point of view. Not trivial, since few active Wikipedians know about the intricacies of Britannica, whereas the world can all gasp (or marvel) at WP’s production line… but perhaps still doable.
Comment by sj — October 12, 2005 @ 2:49 am
sj, I think a dialog about the pros and cons of collaborative versus “traditional” production processes would be good for both Wikipedia and Britannica. Indeed, that’s part of what I’m trying to do here.
Comment by eblogger — October 12, 2005 @ 11:39 pm