EBlogger

Over at The Speculative Librarian, Joshua Lambert is blogging a detailed analysis of Wikipedia and electronic reference in general from the perspective of William Katz’s Introduction to Reference Works. Good stuff, through and through.

His latest post is a quite detailed analysis and raises a number of insightful points. Among the interesting discussion points:

“Britannica, the most scholarly of all general purpose encyclopedias, is written for laypeople. Editors take the articles written by scholars and try to ‘rephrase specialized thought into common language’ (Katz, 226)[…] My question is if encyclopedias are written for lay people, why can’t lay people write them?”

and

“Katz says that all good encyclopedia will have an index. Well, Wikipedia does not but it has something better which most electronic encyclopedia have. It uses hyperlinks. Hyperlinks are the equivalent of and index except they are embedded within the article itself. There is not need for a separate index if people can link directly to other articles by clicking a hyperlink. […] The search/query entry may also be seen as replacing the index.”

(As Britannica supports hyperlinks and search but makes extensive use of its award winning index electronically, I can say I know quite a few people who would suggest that a search interface is not an adequate replacement for a well organized index.)

Author and columnist for The Nation Eric Alterman writes:

“One thing journalists can learn in reading Caro—or Balzac for that matter—is that almost everything that is reported at the time turns out to be bullshit when the truth is finally known. So much of what we call “news” is a fiction we tell ourselves for comfort. That’s what history teaches anyway, but people keep falling for it because they need the illusion to keep going.”

BusinessPundit’s Rob wonders if “most popular” is necessarily “best”:

Which brings me back to my original question - does quality matter? Sure it does. Look at the Pie Kitchen. Of course it doesn’t. Look at the blogosphere. Can a brand new blog crack the top ten because it is unique and well written? Does anyone pay attention to a purple cow if everyone else is ignoring it? If Oprah and Jessica Simpson and Rush Limbaugh and Paul Krugman and other social influencers aren’t talking about it, who are we to think that it may actually matter?

I’m confused. It seems that things become popular because they are good, but popularity can then sustain itself once the goodness has faded away. Is it human nature to prefer popularity over quality? We assume if it’s popular then other people like it for some reason, but perhaps that is a poor assumption. Maybe the Emperor has no clothes. Maybe Google is no longer the best search engine, Ebay is no longer the best online auction, and Windows is no longer the best operating system. Yet they are all the most popular in their category.

[from Purple Cows, Pie Kitchens, and the Blogosphere: Does Quality Really Matter Anymore?]

In a comment to an earlier post, mmChronic notes that my first post isn’t amusingly vague, it’s confusing. Let me decloak slightly to say this:

I am an EB staffer who believes two things:

(1) Overzealous Wikipedians and folks like Chris Anderson misunderstand what Encyclopædia Britannica is about. Complaining that Britannica is unlike Wikipedia or Google is like complaining that the Economist is unlike Kuro5hin or that Wired is unlike Gizmodo. They are different things–related but not identical.

(2) Certain members of Britannica’s executive team don’t understand how to articulate that difference to the world at large.

I only wish I had the time it takes to do this well.

This blog is an experimental attempt at poking holes in particular membranes. Let’s see how it plays out.