Said you were smart, said it would just take a day of your time.

[reddragdiva]

No-one will ever start a serious general encyclopedia again on the "one smart person writes the whole thing" (Aristotle, Pliny the Elder) or "a bunch of smart people write the whole thing" (Britannia, Brockhaus) models — they’ll use wikis and massive collaboration.

In fact, no-one will ever start a serious specialist encyclopedia on the one-smart-person or bunch-of-smart-people models again, because wikis already do the job much better, much faster.

For general encyclopedias the earlier models are already economically unviable; for specialist encyclopedias they’re not only unviable but just can’t produce as useful results nearly as quickly.

Comments

[sbp.livejournal.com]

You'll still need a smart editor or a bunch of same.

[reddragdiva]

For a finished product, absolutely. You'll get more value out of Wikipedia thinking of it as a live working draft rather than a finished product - like compiling CVS HEAD every day instead of using a release version. Things like the Wikipedia Selection for Schools are a good example of what people can do preparing distributions of the content.

But for specialists, they're more likely to be contributors and not just readers, so the wiki may well be suitable as-is. And Wikipedia is popular because it's useful, even if you know it's not editorially screened.

Citizendium is trying to do the serious general wiki-based encyclopedia thing with an editorial structure. The results are variable and its coverage isn't comprehensive anywhere as yet, but the more different approaches the better.

[vatine]

Quality through synergistic leveraging of moronity! :)

A bit unfair, that, but it's essentially what the many-eyeballs principle boils down to, innit?

[reddragdiva]

You let any idiot edit your website, then you make it easier for the good idiots than the bad idiots. Simple!

[vatine]

As I said, "synergistically leveraging moronity". I think we need to find a red thread, propose a plaform for an umbrella solution and pacreatise or flibbros. As an aside, did you know that Gerard David is/was a belgian artist?

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

As an aside, did you know that Gerard David is/was a belgian artist?

ISTR he's been name-checked in a few UnNews articles, so I'd guess so.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

Yay, back to Severed Heads lyrics!

[arkady.livejournal.com]

BTW, your daughter's first two teeth are finally properly through. ;-)

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

Shouldn't that be "no one will ever finish..."? Surely there are souls misguided enough to make a start.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I'm not so sure about no-one will ever start a serious specialist encyclopedia...

In the academic world we tend to get what you might think of as "micropedias" -- the encyclopedia of transport demand management for example (no idea if that's real) -- where there clearly are about 15-25 people in the world who are experts and about 200-500 who might buy a copy (at a high rate).

At this end I think the wiki model is still possibly more efficient but will people pay (even if it's research funds which stump up) to read an expert edited wiki and will people pay people to write a wiki? I think the answer is probably "not yet" for most fields.

The expert editors working to deadlines in this sort of model also has the advantage that academics never do anything until after the first three deadlines are missed.

[brassratgirl.livejournal.com]

Yes, this is very true.

In my line of work (I buy books for a library) I see lots and lots of highly specialized encyclopedias; they're certainly not big money makers, but they keep getting turned out.

Artificially intelligent wikis, you mean?

[(Anonymous)]

As far as I am aware, wikis don't write encyclopedias. Or anything else for that matter, not having progessed to the sentient level necessary.

As an enabling technology to allow a set of smart (or not) people to collaborate on writing something, they have some merits.

[gths.livejournal.com]

What happens if the stupid or scary people scare off all the smart (or at least sane) people?

[vatine]

Then you get MoronPedia.

[reddragdiva]

Worst case, the sane people fork.

[reddragdiva]

Actually, you probably get Encyclopaedia Dramatica.

[phelyan.livejournal.com]

Bah... Pliny's Historia was definitive.