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."
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.
Britannica is still around... (Score:5, Informative)
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, 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:Losing A Snapshot Of History (Score:5, Informative)
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.
"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:slashdot setting help needed (Score:0, Informative)
404 (Score:5, Informative)
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.]
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.