One “very senior Wikimedian,” we are told, “came to think of the project as a ‘city built by Asperger’s.’ ”
If you get the paywall, it’s readable at http://archive.today/R2rnW
One “very senior Wikimedian,” we are told, “came to think of the project as a ‘city built by Asperger’s.’ ”
If you get the paywall, it’s readable at http://archive.today/R2rnW
And yet… it’s orders of magnitude better than anything that came before it, and nobody’s found a better way to do it.
Do you mean print encyclopedias? If so, heavy disagree.
Less errors, more content, more up to date, more accessible. That said, I’ll admit the smell of a rarely opened tome is missed.
what are their advantages over wikipedia?
Being written by professionals, each article written by a single person with an editor controlling their work – these two things lead to far better written text, more consistently organised material cross-article, with a good selection of the most relevant information in each article. Wikipedia is amateurs dumping all sorts of info (which they don’t always even understand properly) that they come across elsewhere online onto the site, and even the “deletionists” can’t really contain this tendency. Carefully written articles with a head and tail are rare and largely products of individuals who really know their shit, but that meticulous type of work is inevitably diluted in the overall landscape of the site.
Note: I’m a fairly regular Wikipedia editor. It’s useful and fun.* But when I need some non-trivial info in fields I’m somewhat adept in, I prefer skipping Wikipedia.
* Although WP in some smaller languages isn’t, some versions are actively harmful due to the amount of misinformation or propaganda, and I would vote for deleting them entirely, including my own contributions. I don’t think there’s any print encyclopedia so hopelessly bad that I’d throw it into the fire. But this is kind of outside the frame of discussion, I admit.
That control is usually about political correctness as defined by the organization making the encyclopedia in question. People often say Britannica is good, no fucking way, those people have just forgotten how miserable it is compared to Wikipedia.