Britannica ceases print edition of its encyclopedia

I am posting some examples of silly ads in this post. These are not my ads and they are not clickable – they are for illustration purposes and I explain them in this post.

I do not feel that the mainstream media perspective about Wikipedia or other encyclopedias is reasonable. In this post I am going to talk about my perspective of the public perspective of Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica is an English-language encyclopedia first printed in England in 1768. I think that shortly after it was published most people believed that it was the best general-purpose encyclopedia in existence, and I think this was true for more than 200 years. Their editing model is that the publisher hires scholars to write each article and then subject matter experts to review the articles. Undoubtedly they did the best possible job in doing quality check and being thorough in including as many subject areas as possible with the resources they had, and they were well-recognized and well-loved by the public.

I think that all libraries and all schools who could afford it had a copy of the encyclopedia. It costs about $1400, and a low paying United States job pays $10 an hour, so I suppose that means it would be about a month’s wages after taxes for a person to buy. The current edition is 32 volumes, and I would guess that each volume is 300 pages. The pages have color photographs.

Here is some information which I cannot cite or prove but which I based on my understanding of my culture believe. I think that Encyclopedia Britannica enjoys a lot of prestige in the generation older than me. It is my guess that if, two years ago, Encyclopedia Britannica’s editors were to contact any major scientist or research organization, and ask them to write an article about their work for inclusion in the paper published edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, I think that they would get near complete acceptance of the offer. In cases where someone refused I think that usually they would offer to turn the project over to a colleague and have them write an equivalent article rather than refuse the request outright. I think that almost anyone who had a need to raise awareness of the work they were doing, especially if it were specialized, relatively unknown, and something for which they sought wider public awareness, they would love to have whatever they wanted to say about the field printed on paper in the Encyclopedia Britannica for the information that would distribute, the education it would allow, and the prestige the Encyclopedia Britannica could grant to a topic by having an entry on it. I think that many people who do not know that Encyclopedia Britannica ceased print publication would want to be included in it right now.

These same people who would love to be in Britannica would most often not think of contributing to the Wikipedia article in their field. In the media and in the older generation Wikipedia does not enjoy the prestige which Encyclopedia Britannica enjoys. I was born in 1980 and I did use Encyclopedia Britannica, but also I did use Internet in 1994 and have my own computer in 1995. Google was launched in 1997 and as soon as I found it I left AltaVista. Wikipedia appeared in 2001 and I was using it regularly in 2004. II could conceivably have used Encyclopedia Britannica as late as 2004, but I remember some point perhaps in the eary 2000s of looking for information in it and having a disconnect between the present and in childhood. I remembered Encyclopedia Britannica as being a wonderful thing when I was a child, and looking again at it in the light of Internet made me think it was so insufficient. Now that I look again at it compared to Wikipedia it seems mostly useless.

Forbes is a respectable United States publishing company. One might think that they are capable of finding reasonable writers, but here in their article about Britannica’s cessation of print publishing, their writer cites a statement from Wikipedia and then writes the disclaimer that “I know this because I read it in Wikipedia, but because Wikipedia articles are often anonymous, this is one of the few times I’ve cited it.” This is a common criticism against Wikipedia but it demonstrates an anachronistic worldview which is incomprehensible from the perspective of the digital native generation which possesses natural modern media literacy. As I type this I feel in my blood the confusion and the emotion of the netgen and non-netgen for each other because I well understand them both and emphathize with both communities. The non-netgen researchers do not understand that Encyclopedia Brittanica is useless because it does not cite sources, and they think Wikipedia is useless because anyone can contribute to its articles rather than only allowing experts to do this. The net generation sees no prestige in Britannica only allowing experts to contribute because so much of what happens online is anonymous and anyway, Britannica’s experts are anonymous too despite being screened by their employer. The structure of Wikipedia insists on sources for everything, and this is the only thing that matters because the integrity of the source is more important than the integrity of the messenger.

Another way to say this is that anyone can post information to Wikipedia, but the source of the information needs to be cited and the creator of that information needs to be a “reliable source”, that is, an expert. In Britannica, only an expert can add information, but the expert need not cite any source or justify any assertion made, and need not draw from an established expert source to get their original information. There is no public fact-checking process in Britannica; Wikipedia is completely, perpetually, and efficiently transparent. Britannica emphasizes the value of good editors over the value of good source content; Wikipedia values the creators of the content which the editors use to create an encyclopedia. Encyclopedia Britannica promises that the editors will have a certain respectable minimum competance. Wikipedia editors can be total loonballs, but while on Wikipedia they follow a ruleset which ensures that regardless of their personal competance or sanity level any contributions that they make fit a mold which de-emphasize the need for an editor’s personal understanding of content and emphasize a structure which would allow the reader to quickly verify any stated fact in an original source. Wikipedia allows ignorant or even stupid people to create encyclopedia articles in subjects which they do not understand at all, and in practice, this system produces a better value product than having an expert write the same content. When any Wikipedia article does get review from a subject matter expert it becomes indisputably better than anything the Britannica model can produce.

I want to say something else. I perceive an enormous change in the quality of books written and research done since the advent of Internet. I hesitate to read any books or articles written before 1995 because that is before Internet or 2000 because that is before Google or 2005 because that is before Wikipedia’s popularity. Often before these events, it simply was unfeasible that the author researching their topic could be aware of all other research already done on their topic, and it was much more likely that they would miss big facts. This depends on the field and the topic; of course many times the author has access to all the information they need on a narrow topic and they can produce research which is eternally relevant, like for example if they collected source documents about an event and produce a work summarizing those source documents without claiming to be writing an exhaustive overview of all sources which exist. It is great to have access to work which takes advantage of the perspective of a person who is connected to the Internet.

Of course Encyclopedia Britannica was continually revised. It is hard to say what “revision” means because it is not a precise term, but it includes the meaning that as new things happen the editors update information in certain articles or add new entries. A revision is a little different from an “edition”, which is means some major revision. I have the idea that a new edition is completely revised – the entire work is fact-checked and presented at a certain point in time. With revisions some information may be new and some may be old and without checking a separate log of changes one may only be confident that the information one sees is at least current as of the latest edition date, and has only the possibility of having been revised more recently. This is something like the software numbering system where whole numbers represent a major edition and decimal numbers are an arbitrary sort of revision tracking.

It seems so bizarre to me that in a print encyclopedia there is not a good way to determine the revision date of each entry, but that is a paper reality. With Wikipedia every change made is timestamped, so each step of the thousands or tens of thousands of steps it took to make an article is traceable and one can always see when a statement was added and by whom and with what citation. Obviously the Wikipedia way is normal and the Britannica way is something alien and otherworldly, but that is how it used to be. Anyway, I was saying that information quality has improved since the rise of Internet popularity around 1995, and that Encyclopedia Britannica does revisions regularly, and occasionally Britannica publishes a new edition when they fact-check everything and then time-stamp the work. The odd question I would like to ask of those people I mentioned at the beginning is, “You believe that Encyclopedia Britannica is a respectable publication. I would assume that you agree with me that the quality of research has improved with the advent of computer technology. I would assume that you agree with me that there ought to be regular fact-checking of the entirety of an encyclopedia like Britannica. When do you think was the last year in which Britannica published its latest edition?”

Britannica has been in continual revision since they published their 15th edition. This was in 1985. I think – Britannica has no motive to publish exactly what this means – but I think when they say their latest edition was published in 1985 and they put the date 1985 in their books on the copyright page, that means that they are promising that the information in their print edition is current to the best of their knowledge to the year 1985. I assert that it is absurd to use a reference which may not have been fact-checked or updated since 1985, especially considering that 1985 is before the jump in knowledge distribution which happened after the advent of Internet.

About the ads in this post – I pulled them off the Britannica article for biology. I counted 46 of these ads in the article, which no pictures illustrating any concept in the topic of biology. I assert that 46 is a large number of ads to have and that the article seems bulging with them. Most of these ads are animated and therefore bandwidth consuming. I would categorize some, like the plastic surgery ad or the instant muscles ad, to be for totally bunk products. Besides the 46 ads like this the page has more ads of other types. This is Wikipedia’s competition and what more people today respect than Wikipedia.