Worse is better.

[reddragdiva]

Germany's Brockhaus Encyclopedia Goes Online. Brockhaus is the German language equivalent of Britannica, in prestige, business model and haemorrhaging red ink.

Wikipedia gained its present hideous popularity through convenience — an encyclopedia with a ridiculously wide topic range, with content good enough to be useful no matter how often we stress it's not "reliable" (certified checked) as such.

Britannica and Brockhaus may be theoretically higher quality, but are not right there on everyone's desktop — they fail on practical availability. Worse is better. Most of Wikipedia's readers (the people who make it #9 site in the world) wouldn't have opened a paper encyclopedia since high school. Wikipedia fills a niche that was previously ignored when not thoroughly botched.

So the paper encyclopedias put their content online. Can they provide a better website than Wikipedia? Ignoring the process, just looking at the resulting body of text? Can they produce content on the range of topics people look for on Wikipedia fast enough at their advertised quality level and keep it up to date? To what extent can they compete with Wikipedia without becoming Wikipedia? What would that entail?

"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect."

Comments

[sbp.livejournal.com]

Why do they need to compete with Wikipedia? They're obviously aimed at different sections of the populace. I'm sure there's room for an user-rewritable non-authoratitive wiki site as well as a commercial traditional encyclopedia that's been put on line. Choice is good. Both are good at different things.

[reddragdiva]

They certainly treat Wikipedia as competition. Britannica in particular is known for getting very pissy indeed about English Wikipedia. Meanwhile, Wikipedia's writers and editors remain big fans of Britannica.

Brockhaus doesn't get anywhere near as pissy about German Wikipedia, but they're painfully aware of its existence and regard it as competition.

The question is, I think: (a) what is the space in question (convenient web-based information sources that suck less than Googling) and (b) how to outdo Wikipedia there.

[reddragdiva]

And dig this headline. We're not competing with them, but they seem to be failing to compete with us.