http://things.auditblogs.com/2008/05/30/wh...eat-britannica/

I wonder if Harry Houdini would have stood against a Spiritualist cabal....

I'm pretty sure Houdini would have discovered Tor a long time ago...

My guess is Wikipedia is already more widely used (read) than Britannica.

List of notable contributors to Scholarpedia: editors

Doubtless. My parents never had a paper encyclopedia in their home, because they weren't the type of people to have one. And for that matter, they still don't, and my mother uses Wikipedia if she wants to check basic facts.



It annoys me slightly to think that others may have grown up with access to something like Britannica (and may have had no interest in it), whereas I did not. It'd have been nice to have been able to know what to expect of a formal encyclopedia when I first found Wikipedia over four years ago. But I guess you can get Britannica online, anyway, but you can't read the full articles on it.

Also, as for the original article, I lol'd. But not out loud.

A delicious irony of Wikipedia is, what would happen to fictional character Hank Rearden if he tried to edit an article on "Rearden Metal?" Jimbo Wales has created a veritable Randian dystopia.

Wikipedia is full of truisms that have evolved due to the failings of the Wikipedian model, that are now getting translated back into the real world.

A couple demonstrated here are espousing the believe that it is a bad thing to write with a conflict of interest, especially as an expert on the subject. Who better to write about radium than its discoverer?

Write from a neutral point of view? Why is that more educational and informative than writing from an advocate's point of view? Do you even need balance, or simply an awareness of the standpoint? Imagine a Wikipedian article on magic, which allows for the point of view that spiritualists might be onto something.

My concern is that just because Wikipedia has a flawed editorial model that cannot cope with such issues, that this is now polluting people's views that somehow Wikipedian policies represent the norms of educational writing and should be adopted in all walks of life.

And it's a self-compounding problem. There are methods of fairly reliably arriving at true conclusions, but they are not practiced at Wikipedia. People who work with these reliable methods and who happen to wander into Wikipedia pretty quickly realize that it's a sad joke, and they exit, leaving the place to those who think that consensus-by-brickbatting is a sound method.

On the other hand, Alexa says that Wikipedia has already beaten Britannica.

Jimbo says that Britannica has his wrong birthdate: link

When Jimbo contacted Britannica, Britannica would not change the date because the word of Jimbo was not considered a reliable source.

Such gall as Jimbo has is hard to find. Britannica has his birthday one day out of sync, and Wales contacts Britannica and complains about his BIO. Imagine how far someone would get writing to WP about their birthday being a day out? Probably get the page vandalised and some spurious stuff added too.

What next? He'll probably start to sue next.

Britannica should do an AfD on it, IMO.

The whole birthday episode makes me laugh, because Jimbo reversed himself about the birthdate on his own Wikipedia article and made such an issue out of it.

I just don't understand how he doesn't seem to know his own birthday.

I'm waiting for an admin named WesleyMouch.

Likewise imagine John Galt trying to make any claims for his engine, which is locked away in a shed with no references or cites. All it does is produce electricity which he sells to Galt's Gulch residents. Sort of like cold fusion, but with no literature. LOL. Are cites from the Gulch Times about their power source considered "reliable"?

He reversed himself on Wikipedia, but he still claims on his own website that Britannica has the date wrong: link

Popularity != quality

I don't doubt that Wikipedia is "more popular" that Britannica, because Britannica's online prescence is tiny (but they've decided to grow it)

My reasoning is that Wikipedia's model will never comprehend why Britannica has been so well trusted by millions for nearly three centuries.

Someone wrote on my blog that Wikipedia's model was better because Harry Houdini mentioned himself in the article about Magic - a classic example of the Wikipedian False Dilemma that it is better to have an article written by a confluence of ignoramuses than let an expert mention his or her own work.

It's like a joke at the editors' expense the thing about his birthday, IMHO. Jaq D. HawkinsJ did exactly the same stunt on her article to show her contempt of wiki or something. She has put two different dates for her birthday on IMDB under her different aliases, just to keep people guessing or disrupt people's ability to be accurate even a tiny bit. I think Jimbo does it for an ironic laugh to mock his creation, and find it slightly amusing.

I agree with wikiwhistle. Some people characterize what Jimbo is doing as "trolling". I think even Jimbo himself might characterize it that way.

I have to agree: Wikipedia is a massive troll against respectable society.

Oh ... you were just talking about the birth date thing, weren't you? Never mind.

That too, actually.