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Intellectual Property Law

: SIVACRACY .NET

Don't blame Wikipedia just because Britannica sucks

By Siva Vaidhyanathan

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So says Scott McLemee: ... I grew up with the Britannica, quite literally so, the edition from 1970 to be specific. It instilled in me at a very early age the belief that all of knowledge might yet be my province, and that "labour" and "centre" were, in fact, the preferable spellings of those words. And so it gives me great pain to say this, but here goes: Any notion that the Britannica's loss of prestige is an effect of Wikipedia, or any other aspect of Web culture, is profoundly deluded. The decline in authority of the Encyclopedia Britannica is an affair entirely of its own making, and began long before the general public ever heard of the internet. It probably started more than a quarter century ago with what I usually refer to as "all that 'Macropedia' crap" -- as inexplicable and misguided an effort to "rebrand" as ever an addled mind has conceived. They eventually abandoned that gimmick. But it seems the damage went much deeper. A few years ago, I got a few recent issues of the EB yearbook, an annual supplement to the encyclopedia itself. The experience of reading them was painful. It made me feel sick. The writing was so bad that it was simply impossible to believe an editor had ever gone over the copy. If I had a visceral response -- disgust and anger -- that's because the old Britannica was for me, in some ways, a sacred book. I do not mean that literally, of course. But neither is it a joke. In its better days, the Britannica embodied something awesome and powerful and wonderous, at least in my eyes. Talk about a god that failed.... The whole quasi-Mandarin "I have read the Great Works of Human Thought, and from up here on Olympus it is obvious everything is going to hell in a handbasket now because of Wikepedia and blogging and Paris Hilton, who created Wikipedia, I think" schtick is, of course, both easy and robustly self-delighting to perform. (I can do it in my sleep. That, and grind my teeth.) But guess what? Causality is a complicated thing, sometimes, and the decline of an established form of cultural authority can be the product of internal degeneration rather than outside forces. ... There is a cute cat video on this post. Thanks, Scott!

Full post as published by SIVACRACY .NET on June 28, 2007 (boomark / email).