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I naïvely imagined the Encyclopaedia Britannica was a reliable source of information, unlike Wikipedia, but I just read this. Whatever you think of Tucker Carlson, this is absolutely not how encyclopaedias should be written. Is everything censored now?
That great reactionary Michael Wharton in the 1940s read cover to cover the 1911 edition which is considered the best. I see his point. Actually I always did. The 15th edition, in 32 volumes and 32,640 pages, came out in 2010 and was the last printed edition. Since 2016, it has been published exclusively as an online encyclopaedia.
It has been biassed to the left for years.
In 1990 Encyclopaedia Britannica had $650 million in revenue, but in 1996 it was sold for only $135 million to Jacqui Eli Safra, a gnome of Geneva rather then Zurich.
In 1990 Encyclopaedia Britannica had $650 million in revenue, but in 1996 it was sold for only $135 million to Jacqui Eli Safra, a gnome of Geneva rather then Zurich.
Microsoft's encyclopaedia Encarta had killed it.
A very accurate bio. What do you find objectionable?
ReplyDeleteMy reaction, too. Then again, perhaps I am too woke to spot the distortion.
DeleteYeah, everything in those paragraphs is objectively correct. You might find it upsetting, but the facts are what they are.
ReplyDeleteAlso, Britannica's great rival was not Encarta; Encarta was never a great success, and it was quietly shut down in 2008. Britannica, like all other print encyclopedias, was doomed by internet searching generally, and Wikipedia in particular.
https://www.wired.com/2012/03/wikipedia-didnt-kill-brittanica-windows-did/
ReplyDelete...you're citing a Wired opinion piece -- not an actual article --from ten years ago.
ReplyDeleteAnd the opinion piece doesn't claim that Encarta killed Britannica. (That would be pretty dumb, given that Encarta died in 2008, while Britannica was still producing print encyclopedias.) It says that "the PC" did the job -- which is what I said.
I'm old enough to remember Encarta. It was pretty crap! It started at like $400, but nobody would pay that much, so its price got dropped to $99. Which was still too much, because it just wasn't very good -- so after another year or two, Microsoft just started bundling it for free with some of their other software products. They were giving it away for nothing, and... it still ended up dead.
Encarta wasn't competing with Britannica, because Encarta was a much lower cost, lower quality product. Rather, both Encarta and Britannica were competing with the internet as a whole -- and they both lost.
Saying "Encarta killed Britannica" is like saying fancy leather buggy whips were killed off by cheap plastic buggy whips. Nope! People just stopped buying buggy whips altogether.