Start Writing the Eulogies for Print Encyclopedias discusses what most of us probably already know, that the 'old-fashioned' encyclopedias of yore are being replaced by "the online hearth", Wikipedia and the like.
In the 1970's, I remember using our huge brown simulated leather-bound Encyclopedia Britannica and the current edition (blue covers) of the World Book Encyclopedia to begin researching my various school 'reports': Mexico, the La Brea tar pits, the human body; they all started with these wonderful sources of, what seemed like an infinite amount of information.
Now my 11 year old son starts all his research with Wikipedia and probably ends it there too, to my dismay. I always ask him what books he used, but his response is that it's too hard to find books in his school library. If I had more time, I'd be taking him more often to the public library to search the catalog (which he does know how to do!).
This article mentions a Wikipedia alternative, (only however for topics in the natural sciences) that I have never heard of before. The
Encyclopedia of Life was started by a Harvard biologist who has been joined by a team of international scientists:
"It sounds surreal, and yet scientists are writing the Book of All Species. Or to be more precise, they are building a Web site called the Encyclopedia of Life (
www.eol.org). On Thursday its authors, an international team of scientists, will introduce the first 30,000 pages, and within a decade, they predict, they will have the other 1.77 million."
(http://tinyurl.com/2rwlef)
The researchers want to make the site useful to scientists and non-scientists, so they are creating a sliding button that readers can move to decide how much detail they want about the topic.
The EOL is certainly a very interesting concept but obviously an extremely ambitious project.
I kind of miss our old Britannica set. They are still available for purchase, although they are being marketed quite differently. Britannica wants people to think of the many volumes as a "luxury experience. You want to be able to produce a lot of joy, a paper joy.”
I just don't get that same sense of "joy" from Wikipedia.
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