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Encyclopaedia Multimedia

Eric Johnson — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 06:59:10 +0000

Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.

– Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., which has stopped printing physical books after 244 years, and will stop selling them when current inventory runs out

End of Era for Britannica

Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg and Shalini Ramachandran — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 12:30:31 +0000

In 1768, a Scottish engraver named Andrew Bell and a printer named Colin Macfarquhar set ink to paper to create three cross-referenced volumes known as Encyclopaedia Britannica.

On Tuesday, Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. said it would stop printing its namesake books, a sign of how readers in recent years have abandoned printed reference volumes for websites such as Wikipedia and Google.

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Wikipedia's Pledge Drive Ends -- So Do Those Jarring Testimonials!

Tricia Duryee — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 00:35:22 +0000

The Wikimedia Foundation’s annual fundraising campaign concluded today after the nonprofit raised $20 million from one million donors worldwide.

The end of the pledge drive also means the end of those fundraising banners on every page that highlighted editors who contributed to the site.

Against the site’s normal black-and-white page design and absence of ads, the contributors’ color photos popped from the page and certainly fulfilled the goal of pulling readers up to the plea.

And while their absence won’t exactly be mourned by readers, it will deprive us of some entertaining juxtapositions, such as the one at right, with the visage of an earnest volunteer looking like an illustration accompanying the Wikipedia entry for a “Saturday Night Live” skit featuring Justin Timberlake called “Dick in a Box.”

Wikimedia said it will use the funds to buy hardware, develop new features on the site, expand mobile services, provide legal defense for the projects and support volunteers.

The site now employs 97 people and plans to spend $28.3 million this year on expenses.

The remainder of funds will trickle in throughout the year in the form of grants and other donations, such as ones from Google co-founder Sergey Brin and 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki’s Brin Wojcicki Foundation, which gave $500,000 as part of the campaign in November.

In a letter thanking donors, Wikimedia Executive Director Sue Gardner wrote: “We’re the #5 most-popular site in the world — we operate on a tiny fraction of the resources of any other top site. We will use your money carefully and well, I promise you.”

Encyclopaedia Britannica Now Fits Into an App

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 01:02:29 +0000

The Encyclopaedia Britannica has been the most prestigious general encyclopedia in the English language for what seems like forever. But it has always been expensive, and a bit stodgy. Today, when people need to look up information, they’re likely to just do a Web search, or to consult the free, community-written, online encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

[ See post to watch video ]

The Britannica, however, isn’t going away, or ignoring the digital world. It has long had a paid website. When it comes to school research, it is often trusted by many teachers and parents over less rigorously vetted sources. And now, it is about to launch a slick iPad app containing its entire content at a greatly reduced price: $2 a month, or $24 a year, versus $70 a year for the Web version and about $1,400 for the venerable print version. (People who pay for the Web version also get access to the iPad app at no extra cost.)

I’ve been testing this new iPad app, and I like it. It is much cleaner and more attractive than the cluttered Britannica website and sports some nice features, including a dynamic “link map” showing the relationship between topics in a visual format. Unlike the Web version, it is free of ads. The app is expected to be available in a couple of weeks.

Whether or not this new Britannica app is for you will be a personal decision based on what you’re looking for; and how much you value an edited, highly curated source over the broader, more easily updated, but crowd-sourced, Wikipedia, which also is available via a variety of iPad apps. Of course, many subscribers to Britannica will still use Wikipedia or other Web sources for research.

An icon at the top of an article generates a link map, a spider web of icons representing other articles related to the one you were reading.

Since I don’t presume to be an academic expert, for this review I focused mostly on the experience of using the forthcoming Britannica app, rather than attempting to analyze its contents. Still, some content comparisons with Wikipedia are useful to keep in mind.

The Britannica app contains 140,000 articles. Wikipedia has about 3.7 million. Many contemporary topics, like the latest in pop culture, or some current public figures, are included in Wikipedia, but missing from Britannica. For instance, the widely praised and popular TV show “Modern Family” gets lavish coverage in Wikipedia, but doesn’t make the cut in Britannica.

On the other hand, there are some topics in Britannica’s smaller collection of articles that I couldn’t locate in Wikipedia. One example: an article on Suzanne Douvillier, described by Britannica as “probably the first woman choreographer in America.”

And Britannica has many articles written by credentialed academics, journalists and other experts, while it can be difficult to discern the credentials, or even the real name, of a Wikipedia contributor.

The forthcoming Britannica iPad app, which also is slated to appear later in an iPhone and Android version, is handsome and colorful. It’s free to download and offers a small amount of free content, even for nonsubscribers. But the vast majority of its content is accessible only to subscribers.

Perhaps the coolest feature is the link map, triggered from an icon at the top of each article page. This generates a spider web of icons representing other articles related to the one you were reading.

For instance, the link map for the article on Apple Chairman Steve Jobs spawns tendrils leading to articles on things like “personal computer” and “software.” If you then tap on say, “software,” more tendrils appear, leading to topics like “Bill Gates” or “open source.” You can tap on any of the icons to read the underlying article.

This kind of visual array of related items isn’t a new idea. In fact, there is an iPad app called WikiNodes which does something similar for Wikipedia content. But Britannica has implemented the idea nicely.

The home page of the Britannica app features a large daily color photo with an accompanying free article related to the picture. For instance, a photo of the Croatian National Theatre links to a free article on the country’s capital, Zagreb.

Also on the home page is an event that occurred that day, such as the birth of the actress Brigitte Bardot, which can be tapped to reveal an article about her.

In addition, the home page features a large search box for looking up topics and three links in a section labeled “Browse.” One, called “A-Z,” allows you to just leaf through the Britannica alphabetically. Another, called Top Articles, includes 100 free articles on popular topics like the “Amazon River,” “the Beatles,” “the French Revolution” or “William Shakespeare.” The third is an expanded list of events and births that occurred on the day you are using the app.

Beyond the couple of free home page articles and the 100 free top articles, nonsubscribers will only see the first 100 words or so of each article.

When viewing an article, you can read through it by merely swiping from page to page, a process I found quick and reliable. A progress bar and page number shows where you are in an article, but there is no bookmark feature. The font size can be increased or decreased.

To the left of each article, there are icons that allow you to save it for offline reading, mark it as a favorite, or email a link to the Web version of that article, which can be read even by a nonsubscriber. A section of the app called My Britannica lists all your saved, favorite and recently viewed articles. I found all of this easy to discover and use.

At the top of each article, there are icons that, when tapped, display the table of contents for the article, and a gallery of images from the article, expanded to a larger size.

I found some things missing from the app, including some features that are present in Britannica’s website.

The most glaring omission is the lack of links to related sources outside the encyclopedia. There are also no videos in the app. And you can’t print articles from the app, though Britannica says it plans to add printing and the ability to post references to articles to social networks.

Especially for students, or anyone who values what Britannica has to offer, I found the new Britannica iPad app to be a pleasing, easy way to navigate through a large body of knowledge.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

In Effort to Boost Reliability, Wikipedia Looks to Experts

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries — Thu, 13 May 2010 23:29:30 +0000

Wikipedia is teaming with universities in a bid to entice professors and their students to beef up its coverage of complicated public-policy topics–part of a move by the online encyclopedia to strengthen editing and fill in gaps in its articles.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which finances and oversees the nonprofit site, received a $1.2 million grant from the Stanton Foundation to work with academic experts on Wikipedia articles related to public policy, which could include everything from political theory to legislative history and issues such as health reform and science.

The goal is to get professors–and, in turn, their students–involved in producing more articles on public policy and improving the quality of the articles that already exist, said Wikimedia spokesman Jay Walsh. He said the site expects experts to both vet Wikipedia existing entries and point out entire topics of importance to public policy that haven’t been addressed on the site.

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You Ask, Jimmy Wales Answers: A Crowdsourced Interview With Mr. Wikipedia

Peter Kafka — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:51:10 +0000

Jimmy Wales’s Wikipedia relies almost entirely on free contributions from its users to create a mammoth Web encyclopedia.

Could an enterprising/lazy blogger use the same technique to interview Wales?

Surely someone else has thought about this stunt before. But I’ve never heard of it, so it’s new to me. I tried it out yesterday when Wales dropped by the Bloomberg BusinessWeek Media Summit: I asked my Twitter pals to suggest questions I should ask the Wikipedia co-founder, and–boom!–I got plenty of suggestions.

Some of the crowdsourced queries:

What is Wikipedia’s funding target for 2010? What happens if it doesn’t reach it?
Has Jimmy looked at selectable, respectable and relevant ads from big brands as a means of revenue?
What is he doing to promote Wikipedia in schools as a tool?
Is he warming to the idea of paying contributors?

Pretty good stuff! I don’t think I could rely entirely on reader questions to conduct an interview–Wales and I also took time to chat about other topics, like Wikipedia’s push-pull relationship with Google (GOOG). But it certainly was a useful starting point.

Which is a pretty good way to think about Wikipedia in general.

Thanks to @Albertoriva, @msmobileconverg, @kavidmathis, @ac_luke and @jasonhirschhorn (yup, that Jason Hirschhorn), among others, for their suggestions.

[ See post to watch video ]

Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages

Julia Angwin and Geoffrey A. Fowler — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:35:41 +0000

Wikipedia.org is the fifth-most-popular Web site in the world, with roughly 325 million monthly visitors. But unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police it are quitting.

That could have significant implications for the brand of democratization that Wikipedia helped to unleash over the Internet–the empowerment of the amateur.

Volunteers have been departing the project that bills itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” faster than new ones have been joining, and the net losses have accelerated over the past year. In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier, according to Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega, who analyzed Wikipedia’s data on the editing histories of its more than three million active contributors in 10 languages.

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The New Must-Have Accessory

Vanessa O'Connell and Elva Ramirez — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:26:04 +0000

A self-described iPhone freak, designer Norma Kamali spends each morning reading the day’s headlines on her gadget’s current-events application. To unwind, she plays Scrabble on a game app. When her miniature dachshund Zeke acts up, Ms. Kamali looks up her iPhone’s encyclopedia on canine ailments.

Last month, Ms. Kamali entered the iPhone app business herself, launching a free application to sell looks from her three collections. From their phones, users can purchase 15 new looks from Ms. Kamali’s lines at eBay (EBAY) and Wal-Mart (WMT) as well as her high-end designer line. “In the fashion business, you see the runway collection, and then it’s a few months later that you actually get it, in stores,” Ms. Kamali says. “But we know that everybody is taking pictures during the shows and downloading them on YouTube—and what’s the big secret?” She adds: ” ‘We want it now!’ That’s the kind of attitude we’re at.”

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Only 13 Percent of Wikipedia Contributors Are Women, Study Says

Andrew LaVallee — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 16:17:28 +0000

A broad new survey of Wikipedia users found that only 13 percent of the online encyclopedia’s contributors are women.

The November survey, which had some 175,000 valid responses, was conducted in multiple languages by the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates the site, and United Nations University’s tech-research program MERIT. They presented the initial findings last week at Wikimania, an annual conference held this year in Buenos Aires. A comprehensive report is scheduled for November.

Of the 53,888 respondents who said they contribute to Wikipedia, only 6,814 were women. The male/female ratio is closer among those who read entries but don’t write or edit them: 69 percent men to 31 percent women.

The average respondent age hovers in the twentysomethings. Men tend to be a few years older, at 26, while women were 24 on average.

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Wikipedia Bans Scientology Church’s Edits

Marisa Taylor — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:32:48 +0000

Wikipedia’s arbitration committee ruled to permanently block contributions and edits to Scientology articles from Internet addresses originating from the Church of Scientology’s headquarters.

The decision follows six months of debate among administrators of the user-edited encyclopedia, who found conflicts between Wikipedia editors who were Scientology enthusiasts and those who disliked the religion. Some 430 Scientology entries on Wikipedia resulted in constant battles over revisions between the two camps. User accounts were created for the sole purpose of deleting or adding information on Scientology, a practice seen as harmful to Wikipedia’s neutrality principles.

Karen Pouw, spokeswoman for the Church of Scientology International, said she hopes the ruling will mean that entries about the religion will remain unbiased.

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Wait…Encarta Is STILL Around?!?

John Paczkowski — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:45:54 +0000

“The Internet is a great phenomena. I don’t see how the emergence of more information content on a network can be a bad thing for the personal computer industry. Will it cause less personal computers to sell? I think quite the opposite. Less copies of Flight Simulator or Encarta?”

– Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, 1994

In January, Wikipedia claimed nearly 97 percent of the visits that Web surfers in the United States made to online encyclopedias, according to research outfit Hitwise. MSN Encarta received 1.27 percent. Little wonder, then, that Microsoft (MSFT) is discontinuing it. The company announced Monday that it would stop selling Encarta software by June and would shut down the encyclopedia’s MSN Web sites on Oct. 31. “Encarta has been a popular product around the world for many years,” Microsoft said in a statement. 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. As part of Microsoft’s goal to deliver the most effective and engaging resources for today’s consumer, it has made the decision to exit the Encarta business.”

Translation: Wikipedia ate our lunch–and our breakfast and dinner too. For evidence, one need look no further than Wikipedia itself, which updated its Encarta entry with the following passage within an hour of Microsoft’s announcement.

“Microsoft announced in March 2009 that they will cease to sell Microsoft Student and all editions of Encarta Premium software products worldwide by June 2009, citing changes in the way people seek information and in the traditional encyclopedia and reference material market as the key reasons behind the termination….Additionally, MSN Encarta web sites will be discontinued by October 31, 2009, with the exception of Encarta Japan which will be discontinued on December 31, 2009.”