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.