the sunday New York Times carried an interesting article on the end of paper encyclopedia, noting that Brockhaus in Germany announced it would electronically publish all 300,000 of its articles, which have been reviewed and refined through two centuries of print editions. A spokesperson noted that they may never again release a paper version (though you know as soon as someone says this, there’s a boutique edition just waiting to be snapped up). Strikingly, the NYT piece stated that as extensive as the Brockhaus content is, it is dwarfed by the nearly 2 million entries in English on Wikipedia. Even Encyclopedia Brittannica, with its 32 volumes, cannot compare in sheer size to this.
Naturally people complain that the content is not as reliable or that it’s easy to spoof Wikipedia but people forget that the collective effort of the majority of Wikipedia contributors is amazingly adept at monitoring and correcting problems. That two million articles can be created and maintained so rapidly, and satisfy millions of users who are not all gullible, term-paper copying high-schoolers, is the real miracle here. If we can get here in a decade, imagine how good it might be in two more? And Wikipedia is just one example, there are others such as Citizendium, whose tag line is “we are creating the world’s most trusted encyclopedia and knowledge base” and involves greater editorial control than Wikipedia, or The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where entries are updated by a team of experts. The information world is being shaped as we live, get involved (or alternatively, sit on the sidelines and complain, someone might mistake you for an ‘expert’).