After 244 Years, the End For the Dead Tree Encyclopedia Britannica 373
Rick Zeman writes "According to the New York Times, it's the end of the road for the printed Encyclopedia Brittanica, saying, '...in recent years, print reference books have been almost completely wiped out by the Internet and its vast spread of resources, particularly Wikipedia, which in 11 years has helped replace the authority of experts with the wisdom of the crowds.' The last print edition will be the 32-volume 2010 edition."
The ultimate hipster edition (Score:5, Insightful)
That actually sounds like a really "cool" thing to own.
Re:The ultimate hipster edition (Score:5, Insightful)
Why, if you owned those, you would be... GOD! Or a washed up singer in charge of some sort of barter town.
Re:The ultimate hipster edition (Score:5, Insightful)
"The Way Things Work" would be a more concise, possibly helpful resource -- albeit I only have an much older edition, which may in fact be more useful as it's mostly related to physical everyday things which could mostly be made using relatively primitive tools.
slashdot setting help needed (Score:4, Funny)
I can't find the setting to show the thread scores. And YES MUTHAFUCKERS, I've looked everywhere.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I can't find the setting to show the thread scores. And YES MUTHAFUCKERS, I've looked everywhere.
Did you check the Britannica? ;p
Re:The ultimate hipster edition (Score:4, Interesting)
Or the self sufficiency handbook. Tells you everything from brewing and carpentry to how to grown your own food and slaughter your own animals.
Re:The ultimate hipster edition (Score:5, Insightful)
More useful in the Mad Max era would be Machinery's Handbook (one of the earlier editions without CNC) and maybe a set of Foxfire books.
Those, a slide rule, and a set of log trig tables, and you'd be all set.
It would be more portable too.
--
BMO
Re: (Score:3)
Re:The ultimate hipster edition (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe for a barbie doll house. Have you seen a machinists handbook (speaking generically, not that specific title) Most are small enough to fit in a small corner of a toolbox... for obvious reasons. The whole firefox series (there's more than one book) takes up only a couple inches at my public library. It needs editing... lots of "ghost stories" and instructions for canning food that modern knowledge shows would just get you botulism now.
Combined that whole stack is about the size of one of those old fashioned very large metropolitan phone books. I just had a "phone book" delivered last week that must have been 4 inches thick, and dropped it right in the recycle bin unopened, as I've done for more than a decade. Why anyone pays for advertising in there, in 2012, mystifies me.
If you really want to rebuild society get a full set of us army (or other service) field and technical manuals focusing on non-military purposes. You don't need a FM for battalion level artillery ops or SINCGARS radio programming, or at least you hope not. You do need the awesome basic carpentry manual, the awesome basic welding manual, all written for the average grunt to figure out. The navy has a legendary series of basic electronics textbooks.
Re:The ultimate hipster edition (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Only if you misread it and cherry pick the parts you want, and none of the rest of your tribe are literate.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Is anyone else just a little bit sad about this news?
Re: (Score:3)
I wish I still had the one I read when I was 12 (yes, all 26 volumes). Of course, it would be WAY out of date. Back then a computer took up a whole building and was less powerful than your phone, there were nine planets, none of them around other stars, man was just venturing into space and we'd never sent anything past Earth orbit, a hell of a lot of history hadn't happened, a lot of scientific discoveries hadn't been made...
You know, for an encyclopedia, printing it on paper doesn't make much sense since
Bad Joke (Score:5, Funny)
How did the hipster burn his mouth?
He ate pizza before it was cool.
Re:Bad Joke (Score:5, Funny)
(waits for you to answer)
No, it's some obscure number you probably haven't heard of yet.
Re:The ultimate hipster edition (Score:5, Insightful)
$1,400 cool?
http://store.britannica.com/products/ecm001en0 [britannica.com]
This is not the death of the encyclopedia, just the ending of an inefficient costly format. Who goes to their site and ops for the $1,400 print version over the $30 disc version?
Re:The ultimate hipster edition (Score:4, Interesting)
C'mon everyone, it's Britannica, let's spell it Encyclopaedia
Re: (Score:3)
I thought it was spelled Wikipedia, they won't admit it of course but Wikipedia providing an introduction to practically any imaginable and then links to quality quotable sources, pretty much killed printed encyclopaedias.
Re:The ultimate hipster edition (Score:5, Insightful)
$1,400 cool?
This is not the death of the encyclopedia, just the ending of an inefficient costly format. Who goes to their site and ops for the $1,400 print version over the $30 disc version?
They also have an app for $1.99 a month. I could get the app for more than 58 years if I wanted to spend that much money. Plus I'd also get updated information and spread the cost out over 58 years.
The dead tree edition makes no sense. Still, why do I feel like I want to go out and spend $1400?
Re:The ultimate hipster edition (Score:5, Interesting)
I own one set and it's not nearly as cool as it sounds. Unless I'm doing serious research work on some even/someone (which I haven't done since I enrolled in college), you're not using it. And even those have been replaced by Encarta and things like that.
There are way better mediums than paper and some are actually done by the so called experts. They spelled their own death by not adapting to the times and wanting the times to adapt to them. Now they have an on-line presence and CD/DVD's, but they are years too late.
Re:The ultimate hipster edition (Score:5, Interesting)
My mum used to sell them back in the 90's. I remember that they came out with a CD-ROM version at some point in that timeframe. I do seem to recall though that it was badly implemented, but they were not 'too late'. They just mucked up the implementation.
Gonna be picking up my an old second hand set soon. Not as a serious reference but if there is one thing my mother instilled into me, it was an appreciation of books. A nicely bound set of EB is a nice thing to have on a bookshelf if you have the space. I reckon this set i'll be getitng is just the basic binding though...
Re: (Score:3)
Parents got me a set in '56. I figured the reading I did in it helped me get the scholarship to university.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Losing A Snapshot Of History (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Losing A Snapshot Of History (Score:4, Interesting)
...flicking through copies of encyclopedias that are more than 20 years old, seeing a snapshot of our knowledge at the time
This [archive.org] should help your nostalgia in the future.
404 (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Losing A Snapshot Of History (Score:5, Insightful)
It's all a question of how much that nostalgia was worth to you. And apparently, it wasn't worth $1500 a year to many people at all.
Re:Losing A Snapshot Of History (Score:5, Insightful)
Which begs the question : Why didn't the EB take the lead as the premiere on line reference resource? They had the pole position, they had the background process of collecting and cataloging the information, it would have been trivial to create an on line presence. Yet, they didn't. 244 years of diligence, flushed in a single decade. Wow. I guess it's true - having information isn't good enough, you have to know how to use it as well.
Re:Losing A Snapshot Of History (Score:4, Insightful)
The "free world" standard for the 19th and 20th centuries, up to the transformation of social philosophy in the '80s, was truth.
The "free world" standard today is verifiability: the more people tell a lie, the more it accepted. Many nations have had this standard in the past, but some countries (notably the UK and the US) have bravely held it back.
Wikipedia's standard is one of verifiability, not truth, so its win over Britannica was inevitable.
Re: (Score:3)
'begging the question' aside, the reason is pretty straightforward and plagues most all established institutions. An institution knows its place and its place is good given a reality they are used to. Seeing a new paradigm starting to emerge is generally something to be feared and avoid risk of accelerating it. This generally means said institution is outmanuevered by some upstart with nothing to lose while the established organization fights tooth and nail to keep the market they demonstrably know how t
Re:Losing A Snapshot Of History (Score:4, Insightful)
Pets.com?
Re: (Score:3)
Osborne.
For the noobs, or at least those under 30 or so, Osborne had one of the coolest transportable computers around, announced they were developing a better one, tanked their current sales wiping out the company.
They understood the EE components model where everyone understands the continuous treadmill, but didn't understand that applying that to a computer is not a good idea.
Re: (Score:3)
Really? Apparently only 1% of their revenue came from the printed encyclopedia.
The rest is from online services and other products. It sounds like they made that adjustment ages ago.
Re:Losing A Snapshot Of History (Score:4, Funny)
You can go download a copy of wikipedia right now. Stick it on a dvd, throw it in some dark corner, and come back in 10 years.
Re:Losing A Snapshot Of History (Score:5, Insightful)
This is quite sad.
The passing of illuminated scrolls was also quite sad.
I was thinking of buying a copy... (Score:3)
I loved having a set as a kid. Not so much to look up information, but to randomly peruse and get a general idea of what is important in the world. Wikipedia has a "random" feature, but I feel more likely to get some Manga cartoon reference than the article on Hadrian's wall. Now that I have kids, I wanted them to enjoy them as well, without burning out their eyes on computer/TV screens any more than they already do.
Then I saw that a new set is something like a thousand dollars, and even 10 year old use
Re:Losing A Snapshot Of History (Score:5, Informative)
Who? (Score:2)
Not going to miss... (Score:2)
Not going to miss the obnoxious 80's commercial though [youtube.com].
Britannica is still around... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Obligatory XKCD (Score:4, Insightful)
http://xkcd.com/978/
Re: (Score:3)
i thought THIS was the obligatory XKCD for this topic?
http://xkcd.com/548/ [xkcd.com]
best investment (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
The Wikipedia "random" [wikipedia.org] button tries to mimic that, I think. Unfortunately it usually comes up with garbage--stubs, pages on obscure locations or even more obscure people. It would be nice if there was a Featured Article-only random button....
Re: (Score:3)
Absolutely. At some point in my very early education, my reading level was not where it should have been. My mom made me realize that the answers to all of my questions about the world were right there in the encyclopedia (at least the kid-size questions!) - all I had to do was pick it up and read. I consequently spent an entire summer devouring those books, and skipped about three grades ahead in reading ability, learning a ton in the process.
It became frustrating, however, when my understanding and need f
Great Books of the Western World Series (Score:4, Interesting)
Might have to finally get a set! (Score:3)
Growing up in the 70s and 80s I always thought I would have my own Brittanica on a shelf in my office/library/den one day. I'm in my 40s now and never got around to it, although I've been tempted in recent years but the problem with keeping the information current always made me decide against it. Knowing this may be my last chance, I might just have to finally splurge.
Ended for me 20 years ago (Score:2)
When my teachers started prohibiting use of encyclopedias for reports since the articles were considered to be too terse. Never looked at one since. OT, that reminds me that I tried reading them from A-Z as a kid, only got to C though.
But... but... (Score:2)
...but how will Luddites teach their children?!?
12,000 years from now... (Score:5, Funny)
"Scientists have been wondering why historical records mysteriously ended sometime around the year 2012. It's as if humanity decided to just stop writing things down, and left everything to oral tradition. It's sad that we will never know what happened between then and the eventua downfall of one of the greatest ancient civilizations that ever lived."
Re:12,000 years from now... (Score:4, Funny)
Scientists have been wondering why historical records mysteriously ended sometime around the year 2012. It's as if humanity decided to just stop writing things down, and left everything to oral tradition.
Too bad they'll never know the truth...all our knowledge disappeared because we put it in the cloud.
Re: (Score:3)
If we go back 100 years, the best record you got of people is maybe a few photographs and a diary. Today you can store a ridiculous amount of detail including full HD video, but you're also dependent on modern technology to sustain that. If I had to leave my computer equipment for 10 years in a vault I figure my USB sticks and SSDs will have discharged and I wouldn't trust a HDD or a backup HDD to spin up again. Yes, maybe DVDs but they're too small and tapes are too expensive and rare. Or even if I could t
George Orwell would approve (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:George Orwell would approve (Score:5, Interesting)
In 1953, when Stalin died, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia was in the middle of being published. In the reshuffle the chief of State Security, Lavrentiy Beria, was declared a spy, but his article was in the B volume which was already published. As a result, an update was sent to all libraries in the form of a page be glued on top of his article, and the encyclopedia has an unexpectedly long article on the Bering Sea.
"authority of experts" ? (Score:5, Informative)
I happen to have a set that I inherited from my grandfather. He was kind of a hustler and wore a lot of hats in his life, including drummer in a swing band, bootlegger, and minister. At one point he tried his hand at selling encyclopaedias. What I have is his demo set. It's dated 1929. Since the articles were written one or two years before the edition went to print, the article on the booming stock market and the forecast of endless prosperity is both chilling and hilarious. It's written by a financial editor from the Wall Street Journal. Equally amusing are the ones on being a proper and obedient wife and homemaker from an article in a women's magazine.
Re: (Score:3)
The alleged "authority of experts" is questionable marketing bravado. In the last century, a large percentage of their articles were gleaned from popular media sources of the day and the authors were newspaper and magazine contributors.
We have a copy of the 11th edition, from 1915. It's not so great for recent history, but the list of contributors is impressive. A friend at work asked me to bring him the article on capillary action because he'd heard that it was written by J.Willard. Gibbs (if I remember correctly...). I had to tell him that the article wasn't actually by Gibbs -- he only edited it. It was originally written by some guy named James Clerk Maxwell.
Wikipedia and Britannica on Each Other (Score:5, Interesting)
60 paragraphs on Britannica's history, status, organization, awards, etc. 15 paragraphs on criticisms, bias, racism/sexism. Cites over 100 sources.
Britannica's Article on Wikipedia [britannica.com]
2 paragraphs on Origin and Growth (one of which is devoted to suggesting that Wikipedia is running out of steam or somehow failing in its mission), 4 paragraphs on "Issues and controversies," including a suggestion that Wikipedia was a haven for child pornography. Everything about the article says, "parents, keep your children away from this new-fangled, dangerous, unreliable Wikipedia thing!" Cites no sources. What is really amusing is that Britannica's stated slogan (at the top of every page) is "facts matter." I guess attribution does not. Their home page features an image of a 1st-gen iPad with the caption "looking ahead." If Britannica considers 2010 to be the future, that explains a lot.
Re:Wikipedia and Britannica on Each Other (Score:5, Informative)
"one of which is devoted to suggesting that Wikipedia is running out of steam or somehow failing in its mission" comes from
However, while the encyclopaedia continued to expand at a rate of millions of words per month, the number of new articles created each year gradually decreased, from a peak of 665,000 in 2007 to 374,000 in 2010. In response to this slowdown, the Wikimedia Foundation began to focus its expansion efforts on the non-English versions of Wikipedia, which by 2011 numbered more than 250.
"including a suggestion that Wikipedia was a haven for child pornography" comes from
Additionally, in 2010 it was revealed that there was a cache of pornographic images, including illegal depictions of sexual acts involving children, on Wikimedia Commons, a site maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation that served as a repository of media files for use in all Wikimedia products. Although there were no such illegal images on Wikipedia itself, the ensuing scandal prompted Jimmy Wales, who personally deleted many of the Commons files, to encourage administrators to remove any prurient content from Wikimedia sites.
"Everything about the article says, 'parents, keep your children away from this new-fangled, dangerous, unreliable Wikipedia thing!'" probably comes from
[In opening.] Although some highly publicized problems have called attention to Wikipedia’s editorial process, they have done little to dampen public use of the resource, which is one of the most-visited sites on the Internet.
For many observers of these controversies, a troubling difference between Wikipedia and other encyclopaedias lies in the absence of editors and authors who will accept responsibility for the accuracy and quality of their articles. These observers point out that identifiable individuals are far easier to hold accountable for mistakes, bias, and bad writing than is a community of anonymous volunteers, but other observers respond that it is not entirely clear if there is a substantial difference. ... Whether or not Wikipedia has managed to attain the authority level of traditional encyclopaedias, it has undoubtedly become a model of what the collaborative Internet community can and cannot do.
and the fact that the majority of the article discusses controversies and problems.
[I collected these to save others the trouble of hunting through the article for them as I did.]
wikipedia is a collection of expert testimony (Score:3)
as someone with 6000 wikipedia edits, i would hope in my dream of dreams that every single one of them was directly attributable to the writings of an expert.
wikipedia is not the 'wisdom of crowds', rather it is the liberation of facts from the academic institutes , the translation of those facts into somewhat simple language, and their arrangement together for easy access. something libraries should have been doing a long time ago.
also a good article will present the work of various experts, and indicate which expert holds which point of view.
i do not always meet my goal on wikipedia, but basically, without experts, wikipedia would be a gigantic pile of worthless trash.
The end of the book era (Score:4, Insightful)
It's sad. I used to have a house full of bookshelves, and I'd read all the books when I bought each one. When I moved several years ago, most of the books remained in boxes. I've been going through them, keeping a few, giving some to the local library, selling some to a used bookstore, sending some early technical books to museums, and dumping the rest into the recycling bin. I just dumped all the original Sun Java manuals, finance books like "Bankruptcy 1995" (the author was a CEO, and he thought the US would go bankrupt in the 1990s. Instead, his company did.), and some reasonably good paperback SF. There's just no point in having wall to wall bookshelves any more. I used to have three six-shelf bookcases of technical books in my home office. Now I have three shelves.
I never owned a Brittanica, although I did have the Oxford English Dictionary, the one in tiny type with the magnifying glass.
Borders is gone, Barnes and Noble is in trouble, and Amazon is moving to downloads. When Amazon goes download-only, it will be over for good.
I grew up with a set of these... (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to spend hours randomly browsing through the articles. At some point, over many moves, they were given away. Now, I find I do the same thing, but on Wikipedia.
It used to be that when you visited someone's home for the first time, you could learn a bit about them by seeing what books they had on their shelves... which ones were worn, how chaotic or organized the books were, how many they had, what they were about, how many were lying around in mid-read... and if there was a set of encyclopedias somewhere. And, of course, if there was not a single book in the house, there was something suspect about them.
I suspect that in a decade or two, what I'll learn from seeing books in someone's house is that they are old. I'm sure I'll be included in that.
It was about 18 years ago, or so... (Score:3)
I remember I politely told the fellow I was speaking with at the kiosk that the price they were asking for was simply unjustifiable, given the cost to reproduce a CD was on the order of pennies, and the price was going to have to come down by about factor of 10 or even more before people would really start taking the CD version seriously. I offered the reasoning that if a person was going to spend that kind of money, they might as well spend what was, relatively speaking, just a bit more and get the attractively bound books.
The guy at the kiosk told me quite flatly that would never happen... that they'd be more likely to simply stop selling the CD version.
I shook my head, suggesting he was wrong... and left.
Re: (Score:2)
The same applies to britannica though. If you're at the point where wikipedia isn't a valid reference, then no encyclopedia is really good enough, and if you just have teacher who doesn't get it, well, you have a teacher who doesn't get it. Happens with anything.
Re:Citable (Score:5, Informative)
No, you have it entirely wrong your insults notwithstanding. Even in middle school, which was 25+ years ago, I was not allowed to use an Encyclopedia reference. I was taught that an encyclopedia is a good starting point, but for the facts contained, you had to go to the source that the encyclopedia referred to. The encyclopedia, in and of itself, is not a source of information but a collection of sources.
So if you don't understand that, then perhaps you had a poor education.
Re:Citable (Score:5, Insightful)
I grew up with the Encyclopedia Britannica. Apparently, though, your reading skills are poor. No, I wasn't steered wrong. The point isn't the quality of the encyclopedia, it is the fact that it IS an encyclopedia. It is not original work, and oughtn't be treated as if it were.
Your insults are weak, misdirected and repetitve. You can't get a simple concept through your head and instead misconstrue it as if we are putting down the Encyclopedia Britannica. We are not. Encyclopedias should not be used as a reference source, only the sources they reference. If you yourself really read articles in the Encyclopedia, you would find they have quite a bit of cross reference. Unless you are a lazy researcher, which you certainly appear to be, you go to those sources, read the material for yourself and then write your paper referring to the original sources.
You call me and the OP "fast fooders". You are the one who lazily reads an encyclopedia and then cites it as a source. Grow up. Learn to read, and argue the point being argued.
Re: (Score:3)
You argue passionately for your point, but you are wrong. An Encyclopedia may be cited, just as any other credible reference. If you do not believe me, perhaps you might believe the Harvard Style Guide [swinburne.edu.au]. Or any of a large number of other available style guides. And have you read through a style guide for a peer reviewed publication lately? I have. You should too, then get back to me with your assertions about what may or may not be cited. Or try out your opinion that Encyclopedia Britannica may not be cited
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Correct (Score:3)
I think I'll side with the guy who's making the most sense.
The arguments that occur over such things as citations ("you CAN cite $FOO!" "no you CAN'T!") have always struck me as moronic anyhow. The one and only question one should ask oneself before citing a source, is, "Is this source CREDIBLE?" If the answer is no........don't cite it! It's that simple. Brittanica IS a credible source. Wikipedia is NOT. This is why we don't cite Wikipedia.
You typically wouldn't cite things that are common knowledge, no,
Re:Citable (Score:5, Insightful)
You will never be able to cite Wikipedia in a paper without looking foolish. It really isn't designed for that. You CAN use Wikipedia to get an understanding of a topic, and the references they use are usually pretty good and CAN be used as a cite without looking fooling.
Wikipedia is a great tool, but it will never replace paper encyclopedias, by design. Then again, any paper that only cites encyclopedias (paper or otherwise) isn't a good paper. Even Wikipedia requires multiple sources, as should any good paper, for a balance of perspective and confirmation of key points.
Re:Citable (Score:4, Insightful)
You will never be able to cite Wikipedia in a paper without looking foolish.
This is mainly due to the fact that there is no "stable" Wikipedia -- things change so quickly that citing Wikipedia makes it very difficult for anyone to actually look up whatever you were citing. If there were "snapshots" that were widely distributed, say at the end of each year, one could simply cite those snapshots.
Paper encyclopedias are great for citing because they are frozen in time. They also contain errors that are hard to correct, out of date information that is hard to update, and searching them is not nearly as convenient as searching online encyclopedias. Wikipedia will win in the end because it can be updated and corrected so quickly, and because as you yourself noted, the ability to cite encyclopedias is not terribly important.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
>This is mainly due to the fact that there is no "stable" Wikipedia --
This is mainly due to the fact that the vast majority of those in academia (=higher education) consider Wikipedia to be absolutely unreliable. And the foregoing is usually with good reason. Most Wikipedia articles on anything from Mexico to traffic lights, are a sophomoric collection of random facts without any overall coherence or structure-- the latter being the exact thing, that higher knowledge attempts to impart.
Add to that
Re:Citable (Score:5, Funny)
The bottom line is that Wikipedia isn't written by experts, or for the large part by people who have expertise in *any* field, and for topics outside CS and parts of the sciences, it's pretty poor because non-expert "crowds" don't have much judgment. In short-- there's no wisdom in crowds, only amplified ignorance.
That's simply not true. Wikipedia's articles on manga and anime characters are second to none.
endurance egghead pukes amplified ignorance (Score:5, Insightful)
You're the guy who would never have started the project in the first place. The truth about Wikipedia is that the process delivers a quality level that never previously existed. How one assesses its quality really depends on how one approaches it. When you arrive from a blank slate, it's a pretty good first meal. If you're trying to reach escape velocity to intellectual purity and enlightenment, well, endurance athletes classify three quarters of the human diet under poison: sugar, alcohol, cholesterol, additives, and on and on. So true. To an endurance egghead, Wikipedia is outright poison. To a starving African, it's a Swedish buffet.
We're on the familiar terrain here of purity narcissism. Not good enough for my fine brain. Definitely, Wikipedia is not ever going to get there. Out of the 4 million articles, there are maybe 5000 where I'm qualified to heap my scorn. For all the rest, amplified ignorance is vastly superior to no signal at all. In fact, amplified ignorance makes for a pretty good road map for charting the quickest route out of town to the lofty hilltops, if you've got a week to kill. Click. 5001.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
>For all the rest, amplified ignorance is vastly superior to no signal at all.
In the same way that a randomly generated map of a minefield is vastly superior to no map at all. LOL What a vapid argument.
Re:Citable (Score:4)
Yeah. I can tell you, there's nothing quite as effective as a 23-year old, jumping down the throat of an 75-year-old emeritus professor because they made a syntax error using WikiPedia's reference system-- which, mind you, is about as ideal as making calls from COBOL to a PIC database.
There's a certain disease of online forums, of the false expert -- the guy who gains the arcane knowledge necessary to run some system and maintain their little hilltop, and knock anyone down who attempts to come near. Wikipedia is the tragedy of the kudzu.
Re:Citable (Score:5, Informative)
This is mainly due to the fact that there is no "stable" Wikipedia -- things change so quickly that citing Wikipedia makes it very difficult for anyone to actually look up whatever you were citing. If there were "snapshots" that were widely distributed, say at the end of each year, one could simply cite those snapshots.
There are stable snapshots, and you don't have to wait for the end of the year to get them:
There, you now have an URL to an immutable version of the article as it is when you read it. Even if the base article is edited afterwards, your link will never change.
Re: (Score:3)
There, you now have an URL to an immutable version of the article as it is when you read it. Even if the base article is edited afterwards, your link will never change.
Is this strictly true? I was under the impression that deleted articles had their history deleted, that merged articles sometimes have their histories merged, and that renaming can also change the history URL. I have no expertise in these matters, though.
Re: (Score:3)
You will never be able to cite Wikipedia in a paper without looking foolish.
I've cited wikipedia when reviewing journal papers before when someone has got a basic piece of maths wrong. It makes the point very well that there was no excuse for that kind of ignorance.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm curious what the Wikipedia article you cited had for it's own citations and why you didn't just skip the middle man and cite those instead?
Re: (Score:2)
You will never be able to cite Wikipedia in a paper without looking foolish. It really isn't designed for that
Encyclopaedias in general were not designed for that. The method you outlined should have been used if your got your information from EB as well, and you would have looked foolish if you'd cited any encyclopaedia in any university-level paper.
Re:Citable (Score:4, Informative)
You will never be able to cite Wikipedia in a paper without looking foolish ... Then again, any paper that only cites encyclopedias (paper or otherwise) isn't a good paper.
These statements are both true, but far too specific -- replace "Wikipedia" with "an encyclopedia" in the first sentence and strike the word "only" in the second, and you've got it. You should never cite an encyclopedia in a paper, period, unless you're writing a paper about encyclopedias. Any encyclopedia is best use as a tool for gaining an initial understanding of a subject and as a starting point for further research; Wikipedia is no different from Britannica in this regard.
Re:Citable (Score:5, Interesting)
You should never cite an encyclopedia in a paper, period, unless you're writing a paper about encyclopedias.
I understand that's the "rule", but I think it's a stupid one. The reason for the rule is legitimate: you ough to rely mainly on primary sources. You don't want to cite the encyclopedia entry on Adam Smith; you want to cite Wealth of Nations directly. That's fine, but if mindlessly enforced (as it is), it means many facts that are useful but not necessarily central to your point aren't given sources at all; they're treated as "common knowledge".
For example suppose you are doing a paper on the history of computer privacy, and you cite the landmark 1973 HEW report "Records, Computers and the Rights of Citizens". But if you look at the report itself it's clear that the report while delivered in July 1973, was started in the Spring of 1972. This means it was developed as the Watergate Scandal was unfolding. That particular tidbit explains a great deal that is curious about this report, for the report lays out a strong case for privacy restraints on private aggregators of commercial data, but then actually recommends *against* such restraints in the conclusion. On January 30, 1973 HEW Secretary Eliot Richardson shifted to Defense, after most of the report had been compiled. The conclusions were written under the his more conservative replacement, Caspar Weinberger.
Now you have three choice for dealing with a fact like that. You can just allude to it without citations. You can cite an encyclopedia entry on Eliot Richardson. Or you can try to dig up original references in US government documents. Well, the search for original sources for a fact like this isn't really worth the trouble, and the encyclopedia citation is forbidden, so what people do in cases like this is simply go ahead and use the fact without citing a source.
I think the *rational* standard would be to have a source for *every* fact, but allow any reputable reference work as a source for auxiliary facts where there is no question on interpretation of paraphrasing. The "no encyclopedia" rule bans encyclopedias but allows similar kinds of references to be used, even though those references are not primary sources either. I could cite the CRC handbook on, say, the atomic weight of iron, but it's not a primary source. That'd be the papers in chemical or physics journals used by the CRC editors.
Re: (Score:3)
For example suppose you are doing a paper on the history of computer privacy... Well, the search for original sources for a fact like this isn't really worth the trouble, and the encyclopedia citation is forbidden, so what people do in cases like this is simply go ahead and use the fact without citing a source.
If you're writing a history paper and you can't be bothered to look for primary sources, and are using wikipedia (wikipedia!) as your reference or even Encyclopaedia brittanica, you should find another career.
Re:Citable (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
A well-written Wikipedia article should
There's that word again...
Re:Citable (Score:4, Insightful)
If you were citing the Encyclopaedia Britannica, then your papers weren't worth much in the first place. Look up the citations on Wikipedia, read them, and cite those.
Re: (Score:2)
You should never have been citing encyclopedias in the first place. They're not a primary source.
Re: (Score:3)
Wikipedia does the same. Go to Wikipedia for basic knowlege so you can go to real sources.
For example you get passed a buzzword for a technology that you need to implement. You Wikipedia the buzzword and you get a quick view on what it is about them you know what to Google for
Re: (Score:3)
Do you think your elementary and middle school teachers are the best voices of reason about new technology, its impact on society, and the best ways to use it?
In the very limited academic world of middle school, the rule makes sense. They want to expose you to primary sources. I still remember my English teacher taking us down to the school library, showing us how to use the card catalog system, etc. It was fun picking a bunch of books, skimming them, and selecting semi-relevant quotes for my papers. It sho
Re:Yeah... (Score:5, Informative)
...because there's no information from authoritative experts on Wikipedia?
On the other hand, I'd love to own print copy of Britannica. Well, if it were up-to-date and not $1,400.
A 32 volume printed set and "up to date" are mutually exclusive.
Re:Yeah... (Score:5, Interesting)
In 1958, this was probably one of the best summaries of human knowledge available.
Re:Yeah... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Yeah... (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Since you're obviously an authority on a vast number of topics, please feel free to contribute your wisdom to the encyclopedia you can edit [wikipedia.org].