Saying Bye-Bye To Britannica

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In 1999, Ken LaVan and I wrote a book called “The Real People’s Guide to the Internet.” In it, we marveled at the Internet’s size and power. “Currently, there are approximately 132 million people who use the Internet,” we wrote, “and, by the year 2000, it is estimated that 400 million people will access the Web.” According to Internet World Stats, that prediction was a bit high -- there were almost 361 million online at the end of 2000. By the end of 2011, however, that number had grown to more than 2.2 billion.

Our book described the many navigational guides available to Net surfers: Goto, Lycos, Infoseek, Altavista. The screen shot demonstrating the Yahoo! search results for “weather” showed 3,854 sites -- and lamented the “overabundance of information.” “Real People,” we said, “do not have time to look through that much information to find what they are looking for.”

Though we didn’t discuss it, at the same time as our book was being published, a whole new genre of website was being born: the online encyclopedia. And they struggled, at first. Nupedia, the peer-reviewed predecessor to Wikipedia, launched in March 2000, but by November that year, it had only published two full-length articles. Everything2, from the creators of Slashdot, gave writers experience points for contributing. Even Douglas Adams (of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” fame) launched a “Hitchhiker”-based online encyclopedia called h2g2 in 1999; however, his company TDV ran out of money in 2000 and the site got taken over by the BBC.

The future of online encyclopedias was anything but certain. But this week, with the announcement by Encyclopedia Britannica that it is discontinuing its print edition, the Internet has officially won.

We had the Encyclopedia Britannica in my house when I was a kid. I used it for many a homework assignment. It taught me the power of rephrasing, which is what you do when your homework is to write a description of something (a bluejay, a state flag, or some other such random thing that we were made to write mini-reports on), and you only have one reference text. But I loved it. That reference text put the whole world at my fingertips; all I had to do was open a book and I could learn about the Cherokee nation or the year the automobile was invented. The phenomenal tedium of the writing meant that I never actually explored any of these topics beyond what I had to do for school, but the fact that such a resource was at my instant disposal made me feel like a queen.

When I was in college, we used Lexis/Nexis, a service set up to make “legal and journalistic documents” accessible. Its focus on the “journalistic” made it a great providers of footnotes but nearly impossible to navigate.

Notwithstanding the fact that the Encyclopedia Britannica was a work of publishing art, it is right in ceding way to bits and bytes. And now that it’s doubled down on this here newfangled Interweb, how will it fare?

Nearly everyone points to Wikipedia as Goliath to Britannica’s David. Wikipedia is certainly an excellent resource -- and always, I tell students, a good starting place for online research. Britannica’s competition, however, is not just a different online encyclopedia; it is the whole World Wide Web. Increased content has meant that, when faced with my own ignorance, my first port of call is the search bar. If Wikipedia has the answer, I’ll get there through the SERPs; but I can just as easily access a YouTube video or eHow.

Now that Britannica is online only, it’s going to have to respond directly to this phenomenally competitive environment. Its move to digital marks a new era of information curation. I can’t wait to see what it has in store.

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2 comments on "Saying Bye-Bye To Britannica".

1. Troy Johnson from AALBC.com, LLC
   

   commented on: March 16, 2012 at 3:17 p.m.
   I read in an article, published earlier this week, in The Wall Street Journal, that Google returns Wikipedia as the #1 search result for 56% percent of queries. That statistic is so overwhelmingly disturbing that I'm at a loss for words. The problem with this is that people don't appreciate there are better sources for every subject that Wikipedia can cover. Now I think Wikipedia is fine but Colbin's point that Wikipedia is "...a good starting place for online research" is so important." The difference is that Lexis Nexis pointed researchers to actual sources. Today Wikipedia is the source and Google ranks push better sources like Britannica, for example, so far down in the search results, that is not likely to be found. These trends are not good.
2. Chuck Lantz from 2007ac.com, 2013ac.com network
   

   commented on: March 16, 2012 at 7:13 p.m.
   I grew-up using an edition of Britannica Junior, which I literally read, from cover to cover. At over 30 volumes, not an easy task. Fortunately, I was saved from the usual fate of someone who relies on one source by grammar school teachers who refused to allow using the Britannica as a sole source for essays and reports. And therein lies the problem with criticism of Wikipedia. Each entry at Wiki is edited, critiqued and constantly updated by a very large team of people who are dedicated to accuracy in the extreme. They may not always get it right, but whatever they miss is soon corrected, ... something not available with printed texts such as the Britannica. All in all, "we bettah off."

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