In 1768, three Scottish printers began publishing an “integrated compendium of knowledge” that they called Encyclopedia Britannica (EB). In 1920 it was bought by Sears Roebuck, the US mail-order company, and moved its headquarters to Chicago. In 1941 ownership passed to William Benton, who later bequeathed it to the Benton foundation, a US-based charity. EB grew into a profitable enterprise whose product was regarded as the gold standard for accuracy and comprehensiveness. By 1990 sales revenues had reached US$650 million.
Yet within five years, EB underwent a near-death experience. What almost killed it was a product that most of its executives regarded as a joke, an encyclopedia on CD-Rom launched by Microsoft called Encarta.
The original content was licensed from an outfit with the Dickensian name of Funk and Wagnalls, and some of it gave trash a bad name. So Microsoft spruced it up, added multimedia content and made it easy to use. To the astonishment of the EB board, this meretricious object triggered a precipitous decline in sales of their gold-standard product.
Faced with catastrophe, the Benton foundation put EB up for sale. It took 18 months to find a buyer — a Swiss billionaire named Jacob Safra who bought the company for half its book value. The story of EB is now a business-school case study in how rapidly competitors can emerge — apparently from nowhere — in a digital world.
The First Rule of Business nowadays is that somewhere out there someone (and not just Google) is incubating a business plan that is based on eating your lunch.
But the story continues. On Monday last week Microsoft announced it would be closing all its Encarta Web sites (with the exception, for some reason, of the Japanese one) at the end of this year, and discontinuing sales of Student and Encarta Premium software products worldwide in just two months’ time.
Why? The company explained on the Web site: “Encarta has been a popular product around the world for many years. However, the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed. People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past.”
Translation: Wikipedia ate our lunch.
To see why, log on to Wikipedia and search for “Britannica”. Shortly after the announcement, a new paragraph was added to the lead-in material to the entry.
“In March 2009,” it read, “Microsoft announced it was discontinuing the Encarta disc and online versions.” QED.
Wikipedia’s ability to respond instantly to developments is just one of the reasons it has transformed the world of reference works. Another is its sheer scale. I’ve just checked the main page and it is reporting that the English version currently has 2,822,233 articles.
Yet another is its linguistic diversity — 875,000 articles in German, 774,000 in French, 568,000 in Chinese, 585,000 in Polish and so on. There is no way a conventional, centrally edited, commercially financed operation could match this.
It’s said that aeronautical theory says bumblebees ought not to be able to fly. Likewise, the idea that a useful, serious reference work could emerge from the contributions of thousands of “ordinary” Internet users, many without scholarly qualifications, would until comparatively recently have been dismissed as absurd.
Unwillingness to entertain the notion that Wikipedia might fly is a symptom of what the legal scholar James Boyle calls “cultural agoraphobia” — our prevailing fear of openness. Like all phobias, it’s irrational, so is immune to evidence.
I’m tired of listening to brain-dead dinner-party complaints about how “inaccurate” Wikipedia is. I’m bored to death by endless accounts of slurs or libels suffered by a few famous individuals at the hands of Wikipedia vandals. And if anyone ever claims again that all the entries in Wikipedia are written by clueless amateurs, I will hit them over the head with a list of experts who curate material in their specialisms. And remind them of Professor Peter Murray-Rust’s comment to a conference in Oxford: “The bit of Wikipedia that I wrote is correct.”
Of course Wikipedia has flaws, of course it has errors; show me something that doesn’t. Of course it suffers from vandalism and nutters who contribute stuff to it. But instead of complaining about errors, academics ought to be in there fixing them. Wikipedia is one of the greatest inventions we have. Isn’t it time we accepted it? Microsoft has.
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
Every day since Oct. 7 last year, the world has watched an unprecedented wave of violence rain down on Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories — more than 200 days of constant suffering and death in Gaza with just a seven-day pause. Many of us in the American expatriate community in Taiwan have been watching this tragedy unfold in horror. We know we are implicated with every US-made “dumb” bomb dropped on a civilian target and by the diplomatic cover our government gives to the Israeli government, which has only gotten more extreme with such impunity. Meantime, multicultural coalitions of US