Yet more sparring between Britannica and Wikipedia. You have more mistakes than us. Well, you cost too much. Well, your editors suck. Well, your contributors are a bunch of pimply 13-year-old boys in their parents' basements.
Yaawwwwwnnn.
The saddest thing about this argument is that it just doesn't matter any more. The golden age of the encyclopedia, which started back in 18th-century France with Diderot, D'Alembert and that whole pre-revolutionary posse, is OVER. Google killed it. In an age of an infinitely expandible, archivable, and searchable information commons, the idea of a sequestered information preserve is as absurd as an aviary in a rainforest. How did I manage to pull Diderot and D'Alembert out of my butt? I sure as hell didn't look up "encyclopedists" in Britannica or Wikipedia. I GOOGLED THEM!
There's always a trade-off between volume of information, quality of information, and price of information. And these three reference resources occupy very different positions on the curve. But Google wins out for two reasons: (1) the sheer volume of information they index puts any encyclopedia -- distributed or edited, free or commercial -- to shame; and (2) readers get increasingly savvy and skilled at sorting wheat from chaff every day, undermining the necessity for information hand-holding. I wish the press would just let this feud die.
the problem with google is that the information is distributed, so I've started to rely more and more on wikipedia to research concepts, events, or terms that need to be defined. I actually think the utility of wikipedia increases as google's index expands.
Posted by: marissagluck | March 24, 2006 at 07:40 PM