Battle of the Encylopaedias - I
There’s an old saying that knowledge increases by sharing. How true! But whether the sharing is free or paid, depends on how you choose to interpret. We are used to the old school of thought where you pay to acquire knowledge, the amount paid being directly proportional to the quality of knowledge (sometimes with a high multiplying factor). We have paid fees for school and colleges, paid for tuitions and paid for books.
I remember the day when a salesman came to our house to sell the Encyclopaedia Britannica, possibly the best single source of information and knowledge at the household level. I was small then, in the fifth grade, but yet was in awe of the loads of information contained in those volumes. The guy quoted an exorbitant price (Rs 25k) and was politely but promptly thrown out of the house. Since that day, I always wanted to lay my hands on this repository of information, and my joy knew no bounds when I discovered this encylopaedia in our secondary school library.
But a print product has its limitation, which I found out in the eleventh grade while working on a project. The information contained in Britannica was outdated as compared with the international science magazines. But this problem wasn’t incurable. The articles could be made relevant if updated regularly, and the solution was provided by the Internet.
Today the Encylopaedia Britannica is probably the most well established one on the Internet. You can subscribe to it for an annual fee of $70 (~ Rs 3k). Well that’s not such a high price to pay for relevant information.
But wait a second! Why should I pay for this information, when I can get it free of cost? After all, the Internet is continuously evolving into a user-generated free content model. The best example being Wikipedia, the free online Encyclopaedia, where users contribute articles and information, and in many languages, not just English. It recently announced the completion of 1 million articles in English, and is now fast emerging as the No 1 rival of Britannica.
User generated content is a new concept, and is far removed from the old school of thought. But here the question of accuracy of the information arises. Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wiki, maintains that the site’s accuracy is ensured through self-policing by its readers and contributors. On the other hand, Britannica taps subject matter experts to produce articles in a closed editorial system, and maintains that the accuracy and quality of these articles justify the fees.
High cost implies high quality. I know a lot of people who will agree to disagree on this statement. Nature Journal recently tallied errors in both these encyclopaedias, and came up with startling results. The experts who reviewed comparable entries found 162 factual errors, omissions or misleading statements for Wikipedia, compared with 123 for Brittanica. The article was widely seen as a validation of Wikipedia’s content and methods. The Internet, meanwhile, has made the Encyclopedia Britannica an endangered species.
Now Britannica has hit back with a 20 page rebuttal with accusations that Nature sent out re-edited, rearranged and truncated versions of Britannica entries to reviewers and included samples that were not even from its encyclopedia texts. It has even asked Nature for a public retraction of the article.
In an online world, it’s the word of the so-called experts versus the common users. Are the common users wrong? Are the experts always right? I see this as a never ending debate.
Wikipedia in itself is an interesting case. Would you believe everything that you read on Wikipedia? If you ask me, even my answer would be, “I don’t know!” Wikipedia’s credibility has been very publicly called into question. Most notably, it was under attack for an entry on John Siegenthaler that erroneously linked the journalist and former Washington insider to a pair of assassinations. But as of today, Wikipedia is gaining in popularity. Even if the content on Wiki can be generated by any Tom, Dick or Harry who has an Internet connection, and free time on his hands. Its tagline says, “The free encylcopaedia that anyone can edit.” I am a tad bit uncomfortale with the ‘anyone’ that is present in the tagline.
It calls for a closer examination of Wiki viz-a-viz Britannica which I will do in my next post. So come back soon.
