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There's a significant school of thought that... Windows' success happened because of Solitaire - Wendy M. Grossman
Web site makes bogus claims against Encyclopaedia Britannica
FOR A WHILE we have been pointing out that there is a mysterious love affair link between the Daily Tech news rag and the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia.
We'd been visiting Daily Tech for the hard core porn and not the articles, when we were bemused by the version of a yarn its hacks claimed to have seen on Wired.
The story claimed that the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which is new to the Web 2 thing, had been plagued by some bogus posts claiming that US politicians Robert Byrd and Edward Kennedy had snuffed it.
The Daily Tech yarn then proceeds to have a long comment from Wikipedia boss Jimmy Wales about how this would not happen on his site because it used a system of flagged edits. In fact, most of the report is dedicated to how wonderful Wackypedia is and how the Encyclopaedia Britannica didn't know what it was doing.
But, as the Wired story makes plain, while Robert Byrd and Edward Kennedy were the victims of pranks perpertrated on an online Encyclopaedia, the pranksters played their tricks on Wikipedia and not the Encyclopaedia Britannia.
So the attack on Encyclopaedia Britannica that Wales was quoted as offering his expertise to prevent, was actually an assault on his own site, which he couldn't stop.
Somehow in its fulsome praise of Wackipedia, Daily Twonk actually missed which site had been attacked. µ
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Shouldn't you be concentrating on becoming a Canuck boxer? Slowly changing dimensions should be left to the British Museum.
The flames burn brightest here but isn't antisemitism a bit much.
Britannica never thought that an open source product like Wikipedia would seriously challenge the credibility of its brand. They were wrong and Encyclopaedia Britannica's staff seriously misread the global market. They are now very concerned about the widespread use of a free Wikipedia vs their paid subscription model From a corporate and financial perspective, Encyclopaedia Britannica is in serious trouble.
It will be interesting to see if Encyclopaedia Britannica survives, but recent indications do not look good. It is the combination of a) the success of Wikipedia and b) improved search engines that has put financial pressure on Encyclopedia Britannica over recent years. Many libraries, schools & individuals are questioning the need to pay for sets of expensive books, or to subscribe to Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, when the content is free on the internet, and often much more comprehensive.
TFA has undergone a major rewrite. ROFL.
It's always the risk, when - instead of running any original content of your own - you just quote some article you read on a website, about an article someone else read, on a website about something that was happening on some websi - oh wait!
Interestingly, Daily Tech's story, for
any who bother to track these things
down, has a Jimmy Wales quote that pretty
much sums up what Wiki's underlying
problem is, and identifies why you Inkies have such a bug up the butt about it:
"this was a breaking news story and we want people to be able to participate..."
Basically, Wales doesn't understand that NewsPapers and Encyclopedias have evolved as distinct entities for functional reasons. If he was a
priest he'd be tellin' us we don't need any more than one book for reading.
~D