The Encyclopedia War


In the battle between online encyclopedias, Charles Miller finds that there is not much difference.
What is really the difference between Wikipedia and Britannica? Not much.

The biggest lesson of the information age is that all media is to be taken with a critical eye, and that no information is valuable until you also understand its source. (One reason for the success of blogs: the information and the source are intimately related, so you always know where you are.)

A simple numerical comparison of error frequency in each source is meaningless unless it’s accompanied by some analysis of how they were wrong. What kind of errors were they, and how did they pass through each publication’s (formal or informal) safeguards?

<snip>

This paragraph of the Nature article, which was reported as little more than a footnote to the numerical smackdown headlines, sums up the problems I have with Wikipedia. Coming across a Wikipedia article that is both well-written and clearly organised is a moment to be cherished, because it happens so rarely. Half the time I visit the site, I end up on the edit page saying “Right, I’m going to clean this bastard up”. Then I realise that this would consume forty-five minutes of my time that would be better spent elsewhere, and I wisely walk away.

But really, what have I lost? It was free, it was linked from Google, I got the information I wanted, it just wasn’t as cleanly presented, as “paper-white” as I could have got from a dead tree encyclopædia. Different media good for different things.

There are two points that Charles Miller makes here that I agree with. First, all media should be looked at critically. No one should get an automatic exemption because of their reputation. That may help explain the declining sales and stock prices of many major media companies.

Second, it is about tradeoffs. Parts of Wikipedia may be sloppily written, but it covers a great many more subjects than Brittanica and can be corrected faster. It took years to convince Encyclopedia Brittanica to rewrite their inaccurate article on witchcraft for example. But the the free market makes both possible.

You wouldn't try to race a dump truck against a Formula One racer. But a dump truck can carry loads that would be impossible to transport in a Formula One racer. Different tools for different jobs.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Sun - December 25, 2005 at 05:12 AM  Tag


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