Britannica makes content free with widgets, publisher registration

Before Wikipedia, there was Britannica.

Really, young whippersnappers, having an organized stack of the neatly bound heavy encyclopedia volumes on library shelves was a status-making must in many U.S. households as recently as the 1990s.

With the invention of the CD-ROM came Encarta, owned by Microsoft, which enabled easy cutting and pasting of encyclopedia content for students focused on speed and ease of research. It became a quick hit in school libraries yet the enemy of many teachers, who now had to add to their curriculum a lesson on the evils of cut-and-paste research, er, plagiarism.

The popularity of free, anyone-can-edit Wikipedia has made academia's battle against encyclopedia referencing--and the publishing industry's efforts to sell reference material--tougher than ever. Encyclopaedia Britannica, which has embraced e-mail marketing to keep its hardback business in, well, business (I've received several promotional messages in the past few months), is now making Web moves to take back its authoritative presence in the industry.

The publisher's Britannica WebShare initiative, launched April 13 with Twitter streaming of a daily topic, announced on Friday a service called Britannica Widgets, with which bloggers can "post an entire cluster of related Encyclopaedia Britannica articles" for free.

Britannica also is offering "people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, Webmasters, or writers," free access to Britannica's online content, with registration.

To use the widgets, anyone can now "copy and paste the several lines of code associated with each widget as HTML into the appropriate place on your site," according to a Britannica WebShare post. "Any readers who click on a link will get the entire Britannica article on the subject, even if access to the article normally requires a subscription. Really. Try it."

Currently posted Britannica widgets, such as the one here of the domestic cat, include colorful entries ranging from lizards to Nobel Prizes. Many more are expected in the coming weeks.

[Philips]

Who cares?

In modern Internet, Wikipedia is The Encyclopedia.

Britannica might be more accurate or something, but unfortunately, Wikipedia links to Internet, while Britannica links only to itself.

End result is that bias of Wikipedia is very easy to spot and to check. Spotting bias or inaccuracy in Britannica? - well, good luck.

If nothing else, Wikipedia is good starting point for any research. Britannica will need years and years to integrate with Internet where more or less all information turned out to be.

[ghostofitpast]

Wikipedia is not EB

Presumably, you know that there is a lot more to the ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA than a very large number of well-written (and edited) articles by authoritative sources all alphabetized by topic and internally-cross referenced. That part is the "Micropaedia." What Wikipedia does not provide (and probably sees no reason to do so) is a "Propaedia," which is basically an outline of all the knowledge covered by the "Micropaedia," thus providing a structural framework for the entire contents, which, for example, facilitates identifying related topic areas not explicitly mentioned in the "Micropaedia" entries." Finally, there is the "Macropaedia," which is a collection of expository articles intended to provide a "big picture" view of a topic area to be read before digging into the details of the "Micropaedia." (By the way there are Wikipedia entries for all three of these components!)

At the risk of sounding to reductive, I would suggest that Wikipedia has become one of the better ways to get straightforward answers to straightforward questions; but, if you really want to LEARN about something (particularly something highly unfamiliar to you), you need the kind of resource that the full BRITANNICA package provides.

[gsmiller88]

Look at the ads!

While I was on the "article" of the tabby cat, I counted 4 ads (not
counting the ones to buy Britannica) and 3 of those ContentAd
links. Wonder if it's any better with a subscription...