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How The Web Ruined The Encyclopedia Business
Posted by
simoniker
on Mon Mar 08, 2004 05:15 PM
from the damn-you-internet-age dept.
from the damn-you-internet-age dept.
prostoalex writes "Don't remember an encyclopedia salesman knocking at your door lately? Turns out, fewer Americans are purchasing layaway plans for heavy-bound multiple-volume sets (once sold at $1,400) and turning to the Web for answers, according to AP/Miami Herald. What's more interesting is that even the software encyclopedias are not selling as well, with Google changing the landscape of finding good reference information. 'Microsoft's $70 Encarta is the best seller but industrywide sales for encyclopedia software fell 7.3 percent in 2003 from 2002,' says Associated Press article."
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Or maybe (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Or maybe (Score:5, Funny)
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Computers are much better for looking things up... (Score:5, Insightful)
In the light of this I'm not surprised that the print sales are down. I'm perhaps more surprised that the electronic ones aren't doing better - results from the venerable Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] (generally) excepted, I'd trust an encyclopedia before Google for general basic research. It's not so much a problem for me, but young people don't have as finely tuned BS detectors as older folks; they believe anything they read on the net. It's near impossible to get them to limit themselves to peer-reviewed sources in their papers, and they really do come back with some absolute crap from some random website.
Parents would do well to consider this when weighing Google against a good CD/DVD-ROM or a subscription to britannica.com; it's a lot cheaper than the print version used to be, and it's guaranteed quality information. Google is an invaluable tool, but it doesn't replace traditional sources of information. (At least until Google Print [google.com] comes out of beta - then we really will be somewhere.)
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Re:Computers are much better for looking things up (Score:5, Insightful)
That's really where the power of the internet is, as you point out - in the specialized reference engines that are freely available to just about any college student and most high school students. For home use, there are other specialized reference engines depending on what you want to look up (www.mdconsult.com comes to mind for physicians). But remember, we're talking about general information here, not writing a thesis - usually you'd use an encyclopedia just to get an the basic idea of a topic, something that a quick google scan or a free online reference site can almost always accomplish.
Parent
Students are supposedly taught English as well... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not still teaching myself, but I've heard a lot to suggest that the upsurge of the internet has exacerbated problems which were only starting to appear in my day. My girlfriend teaches final year school as well as third level, and besides the plagarism issue, many of her students just can't get it into their heads why a random page on the internet should not be given as much weight as an expert in the field. She has gone over it with them, but they are lazy - they want to use the internet exclusively for research as it's easy, whereas going to the library is too much effort.
Part of the problem is that here (in my experience- in the humanities), any half-serious research methodology classes only appear at the postgraduate level. It might be touched on slightly earlier in certain subjects such as history, if you chose a manuscripts option. I agree as to the importance: at a minimum it should be the *first* thing taught in university, and preferably should be introduced even further back in the school system. Research methodology is the humanities is like 'planning' in programming, and it's insane that it just isn't emphasised early enough.
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Re:Computers are much better for looking things up (Score:5, Interesting)
I completely agree. However, I would also add that print indexes still retain an enormous value. I've often discovered a thread while browsing in an index that was perfect for the task at hand--and something I might not have otherwise thought to consider.
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Wikipedia and attribution (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Or maybe (Score:5, Funny)
I find that completely colorable. Kids' dilatoriness cause them to be parsimonious.
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Something that should've been in the original post (Score:5, Informative)
Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. I'm sure everybody knows about it by now, but it's a great source of information for just about anything you can imagine.
Re:Something that should've been in the original p (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Something that should've been in the original p (Score:5, Insightful)
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You are correct (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:You are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem is, would this lead to a tyranny of the majority? If something like Wikipedia were around in Gallileo's time, would it ever say that the earth is round?
Now, Wikipedia may very well have a method of dealing with this problem, but I am not aware of it. Can someone offer insights?
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Re:You are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:You are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what gets the creationists and the flat-earth types all in a twist; they can't present credible evidence to the scientific community to support their claims, so they claim that there is some sort of conspiracy against them, when nothing could be further from the truth.
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Re:You are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:You are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
This is known as the Problem of Induction. In a nutshell, it states that inductive logic is itself not valid; e.g., we can not make statements about anything unknown by looking at things that we do know. In addition, even our knowledge of the past and future are suspect; we have no knowledge that the past is static, and no proof that our estimates about the future will ever come to pass. We have no non-inductive proof that dropping a ball from a tower will cause it to fall, because assuming that the world will continue to work as it always has (e.g., previous balls dropped from towers did fall).
This can be handled one of two ways.
The first is that one can state that we can (and do) know absolutely nothing -- the universe could have been a fruitcake ten seconds ago, and changed form in such a way that we never knew it. Some deity could have created things; or the universe could have congealed out of Lime Jell-O. Logic is invalid and useless.
The problem with this viewpoint is that, if one were to really subscribe to it, there would be no point in making plans. No reason to even live; after all, you don't know whether or not your existence is itself real, or if it will just stop in a second when the universe becomes solid Jell-O again. This is not a very practical viewpoint, nor one compatible with our biology or psychology -- we inherently use past events to predict future results. Ever gotten sick from eating one type of food, and avoided that type of food in the future? Exactly.
The second way of dealing with the problem of induction is by making one assumption -- that things we have observed in the past did happen, and will continue to happen in the future. Note that this means that the events occur -- we may be wrong in our interpretation of said events. This is the principle upon which all of the knowledge of Man is founded, including science.
We can make a lot of measures in a lot of different times; we can apply statistical measures, making our theory more and more "scientific". But we can never say that it is absolutely "scientifically proven". Gravity at 9.8 can be the "best" Scientific explanation. This is totally subjective.
Any human viewpoint is, by this definition, subjective; we are not omnipotent nor omniscient, and therefore cannot ever see every single aspect of every single problem we encounter. We are limited to using the tools at hand; namely, our senses, and our ability to reason, which is derived solely from the assumption of pragmatism.
In fact, it is this admission that none of our knowledge can be 'truly objective' that renders scientific facts so strong. Whereas dogmatic sources of knowledge claim to hold perfect truths, scientific theories have the built-in intellectual credibility to allow for our human weaknesses. Scientific facts change as our understanding grows; they allow for us to make mistakes. In fact, the scientific process rewards those that find mistakes, and the greater the mistake, the bigger the reward. It is a self-correcting process.
Occam said that the simplest theory was the best. But is it really the truest?
What William of Occam said was that, given two or more competing theories with equal support, the most simple of all the theories is the best one to assume correct, because it will have less loopholes to check, and will be less likely to have mistakes. The important part is that the competing theories require equal evidence -- Occam's Razor does not apply in any other circumstance.
It's not a matter of being the, er, 'truest'; it's a matter of being the best theory that fits the data; shoul
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Re:You are correct (Score:5, Informative)
Nice one. So you slip in Evolution with Junk Science, and hope that this makes you sound reasonable.
Evolution is taught as fact in the same way that gravity is taught as fact. The theory of Evolution is as valid based on our current evidence as the three laws of thermodynamics. Now Einstein came along and said "hey - what about this relativity thing I've come up with?" and lo and behold, Isaacs theories didn't go far enough. Does that mean we all float off into space because gravity doesn't work ? Does that mean I can't use a parabola to descibe the motion of a ball thrown through the air ? Nope. Same thing with Evolution. The evidence is there, and hundreds of scientific disciplines rely on this same evidence that supports Evolution for everything from dating ancient objects, to geological surveying and microbiology. Evolution happened... although the specifics of how are still very much under the microscope...
The suggestion that Global warming idea is on the same footing as the Theory of Evolution is a neat distraction, but it doesn't fly.
It's fine to doubt the integrity of specific scientists, or even the political process within the community at large - doubt is a good thing. But lets look at the evidence.. can you point to a specific failure ? Where did the scientific process fall down exactly ? Cold Fusion... nope, their peers caught that.. Global Warming, huh? Jury is still out on that one, waiting for more evidence...
No, I'm not buying it.
Even if the Theory of Evolution is completely wrong*, creationism cannot be pedalled as a scientific theory. There's absolutely no way of falsifying it. It's not testable, because it can never be revised upon discovering new evidence. It remains immutable, and evidence is routinely discarded or rationalized to fit the theory, rather than the other way around.
Creation-Science isn't science.
_______________________________________________
* it isn't.
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Response (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:You are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
D
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Re:You are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
Also modern society is much more diverse in ideas. While many subjects are taboo, the likelihood is there will be people open minded enough to accept people think differently to them and leave the articles as they are.
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Irony (Score:5, Insightful)
It's funny that somebody pleading for reliability in scientific knowledge believes that Galileo's unpopular theory was that the earth was round.
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Nobody educated believed in the flat earth. (Score:5, Interesting)
"No doubt true?" It's an urban legend that it used to be generally believed that the Earth was flat. Eratosthenes successfully measured the circumference of the Earth around 200 BC. In medieval heraldry, only the Holy Roman Emperor could use the symbol of the "closed" or arching crown; everyone else had to use the "open" or pointy crown. This was because the Holy Roman Emperor's dominion was over the entire (spherical) world, which the dome symbolized. And persons living in seaports have always been able to see vessels coming up over the horizon. None of these were innovations in Galileo's time, and the idea of the spherical earth was hardly perceived as ridiculous or unacceptable.
I would also point out that Galileo died in 1642, a hundred and twenty years after Magellan's circumnavigatory expedition was completed!
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Re:You are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
One is that you don't see the collective result of *everybody* peer reveiwing the entry - you are only guranteed to get the result of the last person who edited the entry. So if 1000 people agreed with an entry that said "X is true", and one person edited it to say "X is false", if that one person is the most recent person to have touched it, then *his* version of things is all you'll see. You're only guaranteed to see a version which is in agreement with the previous viewer's opinions, not a version that is an average of everyone's opinions that came before him. One person can wipe out an entire years worth of peer review on an entry in a single moment.
The other problem is that even if it does reflect accurately the opnions of all the 'peers' who reviewed it, the entry will then only be accurate in those areas where public opinion reflects the truth. This is often not the case when the public is poorly informed. I'd much rather read an encyclopedia article on nuclear power that was edited and approved by nuclear scientists than one that was edited and approved by a collection of J. Random Users. Science is one area where this can be a problem, and any area where stereotyping by the public is common is another. (For example, let's say I (an atheist) got invited to witness someone's pagan summer solstice celebrations. Before I decide if I want to do that, I'd like to read up on what those celebrations entail. I'd trust a source that I kenw was written by actual pagans on the matter before I'd trust a source that was written by the public at large, given that such a source is likely to contain incorrect stereotypes.)
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Re:You are correct (Score:5, Informative)
2) You make two mistaken assumptions. (A) Not everyone edits all articles - people tend to stick to what they know. Therefore, articles are generally edited by informed users. (B) A lot of Wikipedia's changes (50%, if I had to guess) come from a relatively small pool of very active contributors (200 or so), most of whom are very well educated. If you look up an article on Nuclear physics, you'll probably get something that was written by someone majoring in/with a BS in physics or chemistry. So it's not PHDs, but it's not Joe Q Average either.
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Re:You are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
Many middle-class households (the only ones who could afford a traditional print encyclopedia) bought them for their symbolic value: they showed that you were reasonably well-educated, that you valued education, that you could afford encyclopedias. They also bought them because of pressure not to "let your kids get behind" in an increasingly competitive academic environment.
These are precisely the reasons that many parents bought (and continue to buy) home computers. Just look at how personal computeres were marketed in the early 1980s, when it was not at all clear why you would want one. Look at how they are marketed to parents today.
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Re:Something that should've been in the original p (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree. I was contacted to block a website through our school district web filter.
www.martinlutherking.org [martinlutherking.org]
It's purely a hate/descrimination web site and the domain name [internic.net] is owned by a known white supremacist [stormfront.org] organization. But the kids that find sites like these view them as if they are fact! Kids don't do a whois search. It doesn't even enter into their minds that someone would post misleading and false information on the web. A simple Google search [google.com] turns up all sorts of "information" that points to this "factual" website.
Part of me needs to block it, but kids need to see this stuff too, otherwise they'll leave school and suddenly vast swaths of the web are now "unhidden" and they won't know what to believe. Maybe I don't give kids enough credit, but it's a troubling thought that our censorship of the web might be doing more harm in the long run, and I'm a part of that.
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Lobbying (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Lobbying (Score:5, Insightful)
A quote I have hanging on my wall:
That will only become more true as the pace of change quickens. Artificial scarcity be damned.
(Right beside that quote I've also got a few Singularity [kurzweilai.net] quotes, about the exponential nature of progress, and the likelihood [gmu.edu] of mankind surving these next few critical decades.)
--
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in other news... (Score:5, Funny)
the candlemaker lobby are asking for sanctions to keep the vital candle market afloat.
Re:in other news... (Score:5, Interesting)
You ever read Ayn Rand's Anthem? If not you should, it's a really good book. As a matter of fact, one of the premises of the book was what would happen if there was a society more interested in the status quo and change (modeled after the commies). There were a lot of interesting points -- one of which was that light bulbs would never be made because the industry of candlemakers would be put out of business. And if you don't benefit your fellow man, you must be evil.
Sometimes I wish I were a literary nerd so I could explain things better. Oh well, here's [wikipedia.org] a link to a Wikipedia summary.
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Re:in other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not a Randroid or an Objectivist, but I have read and enjoyed both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead; her two first real novels, as I recall. Both were fantastic, and both made very solid points about a number of good things -- the power of the unfettered mind, the crime of stealing the fruits of one's labor, and the travesty of assuming that the best world is one in which everyone is equal. We need our geniuses, just as we need our burger-flippers.
The problem is, after these were written, Rand started buying into her own press. She started writing crap like Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. She took some good general ideas, and made very bad hard-and-fast rules of of them, completely ignoring any evidence to the contrary.
In this, Rand is an example of exactly how one should not handle criticism. Instead of reconsidering her viewpoints in light of constructive critique, she violently lashed out at anyone who questioned her Divine Word.
But that doesn't mean that she didn't have some good ideas.
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Safe-for-work encyclopedias are still valuable (Score:5, Funny)
The saddest thing of all (Score:5, Funny)
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Obvious news tidbit of the day... (Score:5, Insightful)
Never before have the key values of resourcefulness and problem solving been so apparant in individuals and the work place, where before wrote memorized knowledge was necessary.
Having the internet, and refined resourcefulness trumps anyone who has wrote memorized anything. With the internet as a resource, instead of a 30 book bound volume set of encyclopedias, a resourceful person can find answers and implement them in minutes, where before it could take an hour to find information, and then more than a few hours to then find that information was OUT OF DATE.
i love the internet and everything it's done for me. I'm not a super genius, but being extremely efficient and resourceful, and knowing how to use google, has made me look like a fricken star both to peers and my employer.
-Jeff
A few nits to pick. (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, have you noticed that MS gives Encarta away with everything ?
Third: Duh! Universal free access to a worldwide information store is eliminating the need for large, expensive and quickly obsoleted books? My god stop the presses. In other news the Edison wax cylinder is no longer used in favour of a strange plastic disc read by lazers, wax salesman frieghtened.
Re:A few nits to pick. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, it would be *far* more likely if Google had never come around. Google is the single driving force that has pushed and pushed at the other search engines to try and keep up ( sites like Teoma and the new Yahoo are getting closer in terms of accuracy, but Google has been at the top for so long now that it has found its brand name being added to the dictionary as a verb, and is constantly appearing in pop culture references like TV shows and Movies. You can't pay for that kind of advertising ).
If it weren't for Google pioneering the slick, streamlined search interface, the massive popup banners and "portal" monstrosities of AltaVista and Yahoo would still be the standard.. in fact, they would probably be even worse.
And thus, if it weren't for Google, searching for stuff on the internet would still be so incredibly painful and take so long that I could probably find it faster in the Britannica.
People just don't give Google enough credit. They totally revolutionized their space, and are still revolutionizing it( check out Google labs [google.com] if you don't believe me ). You don't see many companies doing that nowadays.
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Your results may vary (Score:5, Funny)
in defence of paper encyclopedias... (Score:5, Insightful)
But, as a teenager, I got a full Encyclopaedia Brittanica from my grandmother as a gift. And the nerd in me couldn't keep me from picking up a random volume, leafing through it and waiting for something to catch my eye.
The variation on that would be that I'd look something up, and, in the process of finding the right page, some other entry would catch my eye and I'd read up on something (usually completely unrelated) after finding what I'd originally gone looking for.
Hypertext kicks ass. Ain't no arguing against that one. But search engines show you what you were looking for - it's a lot harder to 'stumble across' completely unexpected stuff on online reference engines. I ain't buying another paper encyclopedia, to be sure... at least not at the price my grandmother paid for mine... but, in the quest for pure, unadulterated trivia, there ain't nothing like it...
At one time... (Score:5, Interesting)
I haven't used the DVD version, but I assume the articles are as good. By comparison MS Encarta is a joke. It has a lot of articles but they're half the length of Britannica's at best. The atlas is good though and is probably the killer feature in the 'Deluxe' version and it's the reason I own it.
I guess the ultimate encyclopedia would combine the articles from Britannica with the atlas from Encarta.
Still, neither of them is free. Happily Wikipedia has filled that vacuum quite nicely. I'm sure some of the content is pretty dodgy (or pointless), but it does benefit from a great breadth of articles and a keen team of volunteer editors to keep it going.
Freedom... (Score:5, Insightful)
1)The cost of printing. This is expensive when you consider the cost of 24 Hardcover books.
2)The cost of fact checking. Again, this is expensive, as your credibility relies on your information being correct.
With the freedom of information that the internet has provided us, (1) is a non-issue. (2) However, is still an important one. As we all know, just because its posted on the internet (in duplicate at times!) its not always true. In the end, you might just end up with what you paid for, or you might end up reading a factual, cutting edge lab study that was posted the week previous. Personally? I use wikopedia and everything2.com when im looking up something that piques my interest. When im writing a paper? I'm going to be hitting up a libray and dusting off an encylopedia. Sure i'd use internet sources (read:google) as a tool, but id be extremely carefull with my sources.
Wasn't this one of the selling points of CD-ROMs? (Score:5, Informative)
For bound encyclopedias, it's a cost/benefit analysis. For $1400, you can get 2 1/2 years of high speed internet access, with pretty much all the information you can handle. Encyclopedias are just too expensive for what you get.
Encyclopedias should go digital (Score:5, Insightful)
Encyclopedias date very quickly (Score:5, Insightful)
With the Internet, I could have that information in a few minutes, even seconds if I find a good source. Encyclopedias just cannot compete with such instantaneous and nearly cost free knowledge.
James Burke has touched on this phenomenon is his latest series of books. That the explosion and specialization of knowledge has lead to where we are today, that no one really "knows" anything anymore and that as soon as something is discovered it is obsolete. Those that will prosper the most in the future will have skills that lead to them the sources of knowledge they require without the need to retain that knowledge for themselves (his theory).
A sad day... (Score:5, Funny)
Encyclopedias hold a special place in my heart. When I was entering college, some of my older relatives decided to dump, excuse me, bless me with their collection of encyclopedias from the early 80s. Ah, yes, these 15 year old fountains of knowledge would really be a blessing for me to get the most out of my college education.
Years later, as I was cleaning out the house, I came across a dusty pile of now 20-year old encyclopedias. I was going to throw them out, but then said relatives looked on me with disdain, at how I was throwing away their precious gifts. They said they would take them, rather than allow them to be thrown away. 2 months later, when they never came to pick them up, I threw them out. And they've never asked about them again. Although, knowing these relatives, they'd probably demand I pay them the "fair" value of the books. So, not what they'd be worth to someone who lives in the real world (absolutely nothing), but the price they paid for the books + interest + inflation. Gotta love family...
On educating teachers (Score:5, Funny)
Teacher. Onyxruby, are you done already?
Me. Yup
Teacher. Really? Just where did you get all information?
Me. CIA
Classroom. Laughter breaks out.
Teacher. Your telling me you got information from the CIA?
Me. That's what I just said.
Teacher. Care to share this treasure trove with the class.
Me. Sure.
Teacher gets back there expecting to see that I'm bullshitting her. I show her:
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/
Everything she wanted from per capita income to the number of tv's was in there. Look on her face went from sheer disbelief to righteous indignation as she started writing it on the white board for the whole class to read. I haven't looked back at encyclopedias since.
Speaking from experience as a contributor of sorts (Score:5, Interesting)
Based on this experience, I've decided that it's FAR, FAR easier to work on a Wikipedia article than one that would go in a commerical encyclopedia. Not just because there's peer review without any institutionalization required(someone reviewing generally reviews the article itself and not the database info), but because the amount of research any one person has to do is minimal for most topics; if you know something, you put it in, else you leave it open for the next guy and mark the article a stub. Eventually someone comes along who knows the bits that are missing, and the article is completed with a minimum of tedium on everyone's part. The articles that nobody knows about, you can post bounties for, and eventually someone brave and passionate about the subject will take on the adventure of searching through dusty archives in the real world looking for the letters or documents that would give him material for an article. There's not really any commercial interest to spoil this picture, since it's all entirely voluntary.
Vandalization is less of a problem than one might think; if the article is simply turned into whitespace, you roll it back from the history, which covers 100 edits IIRC. If there's bad information, someone had to work hard to come up with it and put it there; it can't be done on a massive scale like other forms of Internet abuse, and it takes at most an equal amount of effort to give the bad information a place as a "minority viewpoint," and much less to just roll the page back. If rival factions fight over an entry, then either it gets hammered out over time into something acceptable to both sides, or it gets locked.
However, I admit that I still am hesitant to cite Wikipedia as a source, and turn to the library's Britannica for all my encylopedia citations and fact-checking, just because of that "you never know" tendency. It'll probably go away as the Wikipedia becomes better developed and respected. I know that the development of Internet citations took a similar path while I was in school. In middle school(the mid-to-late 90s), the Internet was still "new enough" that many teachers just banned citing from it outright. Later, by high school, they had developed lists of trusted sites to access. Now in college, I can feasably cite anything I want off the Net if I think it's trustable, but most of what I end up using are official documents in PDF format from some research or government group, because they all post them online these days. Wikipedia citations will probably follow in a year or three.
Re:Suprising? (Score:5, Funny)
the web has my blog. britannica doesn't. the web is winning. isn't it obvious what people want?
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Re:What will save the industry (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Same thing... (Score:5, Funny)
I used to do that. Drove my younger sister nuts.
"What are you reading?"
"M."
"You're just *reading* the whole thing?"
"Yep. I really liked 'L'. This is the sequel."
"You are SO WEIRD!"
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