Comments on: Britannica 2.0, you’re no Wikipedia

By: Chip

Chip — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:25:46 +0000

OK, Tom. Let me hear the pitch. Why should someone use Britannica.com? Justify that $69.95 for me.

By: Tom Panelas

Tom Panelas — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 17:57:33 +0000

“Somehow it sees to me there is no contest – in the sense that the Britannica and Wikipedia … address different target populations with different types of offerings.”

@Nathan Zeldes: I think you’re right. Britannica and Wikipedia are dramatically different, and if there are any similarities between the two they’re at the most abstract level. The site Britannica is building isn’t a wiki at all. But what can you do? People will see things as they’re predisposed to. Did someone mention “bias”? :-)

By: Chip

Chip — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 17:46:12 +0000

My great-grandmother had a 1950 edition of Funk & Wagnalls. We kids used to snicker at the name, but we loved the full-color spreads of the flags of the world. That’s the trouble with dead tree editions, though: they go out of date. Many of those flags are no more, and many have been added — even the US flag has two more stars.

By: Joseph A. Nagy, Jr.

Joseph A. Nagy, Jr. — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 08:23:50 +0000

I too hate the idea of having to shell out CC information just to do a free trial, and then get billed if I forget to cancel the free trial. Bah humbug to that. Just end the free trial.

I really have no other complaints with EB other then to say I have never owned a copy. My family does, however, have a rather dated set of Funk & Wagnell’s encyclopedias.

By: Chip

Chip — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 19:44:56 +0000

Not only that, but they’re often very good at convincing others that their biases are pure facts. They are, after all, the experts.

By: apotheon

apotheon — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 19:21:46 +0000

Experts are often blind to their own biases — an even bigger problem than simply having biases.

By: Chip

Chip — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 19:17:41 +0000

Those are often difficult to quantify.

But yes, if Wikipedia does one thing to extreme, that would be their attempts to eliminate bias and maintain a neutral tone. The problem with relying on experts alone is that experts are often biased.

By: apotheon

apotheon — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:05:41 +0000

It’s worse than that — Britannica is, in my experience, as prone to error as Wikipedia. The difference is that Britannica’s errors tend to be errors of bias more often than Wikipedia’s.

By: Chip

Chip — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 17:34:27 +0000

You may be right, Nathan. But I think Britannica’s market for that information is shrinking quickly. Back in the days before the web, when I needed to do in-depth research I wouldn’t use Britannica as one of my sources. No, I’d go to the library and start with a Bibliography of Bibliographies or the card catalog — then check out all the source literature I could find. At that time, Britannica and other encyclopedias filled what has now become Wikipedia’s niche: general knowledge on a subject of curiosity, with the understanding that you need to research further to get all the details. Britannica is still too general to act as an authoritative source on any specific topic, but not broad enough to compete with Wikipedia in the “general knowledge” space, IMHO.

By: Nathan Zeldes

Nathan Zeldes — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:39:59 +0000

Somehow it sees to me there is no contest – in the sense that the Britannica and Wikipedia are not in competition at all. They address different target populations with different types of offerings. We cherish our shelf of the hardcopy Britannica, and use it for authoritative academic data at times, but Wikipedia fulfills a completely different expectation – instant (and free) access, a far wider range of subjects including informal and popular culture, and information we know we need to put through skeptical analysis and validation.

As long as Britannica needs to turn a profit and Wikipedia is a communal labor of love, this difference is unlikely to change.

By: Chip

Chip — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 17:58:37 +0000

Thanks for responding, Tom. I seriously wondered about that. The relevant section from the Sydney Morning Herald is:

“He said the encyclopedia had set a benchmark of a 20-minute turnaround to update the site with user-submitted edits to existing articles, which are written by the encyclopedia’s paid expert contributors.”

Where “He” is Mr. Cauz. You might want to get them to correct that if it isn’t true.

By: Tom Panelas

Tom Panelas — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 15:40:17 +0000

Britannica has no intention of acting on every submission our editors get within 20 minutes of the time it comes in. The idea that we do apparently comes from an ambiguous sentence in the Sydney Morning Herald that could perhaps be interpreted to mean this. In any event, it isn’t true. The 20-minute timetable has to do with an aspect of our publishing process and new data migrating to various servers and products. It has nothing to do with the editorial process.

There’s no single timetable for reviewing submissions from readers because they’re all different. If you find a misspelling and tell us about it, we’ll probably publish a correction fast. On the other hand, if you tell us an article about 17th century France by a leading historian is completely wrongheaded in the role it ascribes to Cardinal Richelieu in the establishment of royal absolutism, and you’re kind enough to include eight paragraphs of heavily revised text to suggest how the problem might be corrected, we’re going to take a bit more time with that one. More than 20 minutes, I am very confident in saying. Among other steps, we’ll give the writer of the article the courtesy of checking with her on it, and we might talk to other advisers as well.

We plan to handle edits from readers and contributors promptly, and we’ve put resources into making this happen, but there’s no stopwatch. Sometimes it’s better to leave something imperfect just as it is awhile longer than to change it hastily and make it worse.