Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 142 posts

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#101

Post by nakkiel »

rhplus wrote: post #95
grellas wrote: post #31

It is easy to disparage the Encyclopedia Britannica from a modern perspective - out-of-step, overpriced, outmaneuvered by competitors - but there is a great sadness here at the demise of something that represented an effort by western scholars to "capture the world's knowledge." Imagine assembling a "A" team of scholars and scientists, getting them to make substantial, substantive contributions in each of their respe…

I think the most notable aspect of the 1911 edition - and every edition before and since - is that each is still around, distinct and readable. I don't yet know whether people will be able to reference a '2011 edition' of Wikipedia in a hundred years time. I'm aware of various archival projects, but unless they receive continued support, we could very easily be at risk of losing vast checkpoints in the history of hum…

Well, download a dump of Wikipedia and be done with it. When you say "still around", you should know that digital bits have the potential to be around forever while paper books require a lot of efforts to keep around just a couple of decades.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preservation_%28library_and_arc...

I have an encyclopedia that's now 120 (or so) at home and I don't read it anymore because I'm too affraid to damage it. It's sad because it's gold mine of stereotypes and good words on blacks and gays.

I think your point regarding "checkpoints" is more interesting but still falls moot because Wikipedia uses versionning. If you really cared that much about digital data you would do what you are doing with your book: keeping it.

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#103

Post by anamax »

yarone wrote: post #48

I recall reading a story (couldn't find it just now) about how Bill Gates tried unsuccessfully to license the Britannica content to create his digital encyclopedia product. Instead, Microsoft cobbled together assets themselves and built Encarta (1993). Microsoft proceeded to trounce the print Encyclopedia business by creating a better product that severely undercut the traditional players. Here we are, 2012, finally…

> Instead, Microsoft cobbled together assets themselves and built Encarta (1993).

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk_%26_Wagnalls , Microsoft licensed Funk and Wagnalls.

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#104

Post by camiller »

rwmj wrote: post #9
starfox wrote: post #5

“Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.” The future is clearly http://www.britannica.com

The future is so clearly not britannica.com. That site doesn't even work without javascript, and where the heck is the "Edit" button?

> ... and where the heck is the "Edit" button?

Huh, I just pulled up five articles at random and they all had edit buttons. Granted, it doesn't let you edit the main article, but you can create your own version of one or send a suggestion/correction to the editor.

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#105

Post by pjscott »

electromagnetic wrote: post #96
pjscott wrote: post #38

It's interesting how gradual history can seem, even when we're in the middle of huge changes. Online sources of information just kept getting better, too slowly to really notice, and print encyclopedias seemed less and less relevant, but it wasn't until today that this really hit me. The Encyclopaedia Britannica is no longer being printed. That's kind of shocking, though in retrospect it seems almost inevitable.

Indeed history is gradual, but the thing that shocks me about this is that in 3,000 years when our successors look back, is this the period they're going to think our society ended? Is their society going to be digging through the buried remains of silicon valley and saying "their civilization seemed to disappear when they started mass producing these 3.5" and 2.5" boxes containing sheets of metal. It seems far fetch…

Redundancy is easier than ever. To use your example of Wikipedia, there are a few sites around the world that mirror the periodic data dumps from Wikipedia, and if you feel like donating about 7.7 GB to the preservation of history, there are torrents:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents

On that note, this is probably the best general discussion I've seen of archiving our digital data:

http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#106

Post by mnl »

nakkiel wrote: post #101
rhplus wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the most notable aspect of the 1911 edition - and every edition before and since - is that each is still around, distinct and readable. I don't yet know whether people will be able to reference a '2011 edition' of Wikipedia in a hundred years time. I'm aware of various archival projects, but unless they receive continued support, we could very easily be at risk of losing vast checkpoints in the history of hum…

Well, download a dump of Wikipedia and be done with it. When you say "still around", you should know that digital bits have the potential to be around forever while paper books require a lot of efforts to keep around just a couple of decades. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preservation_%28library_and_arc... I have an encyclopedia that's now 120 (or so) at home and I don't read it anymore because I'm too affraid to dama…

Well, they have that potential as long as the copyright holders won't go out of business, consumers stop viewing content as disposable goods and hence keep copies... and the FBI stops closing sharing sites. Now seriously, you're wrong. I've got a book from 1640 and looks fine: as long as they're printed on acid free paper they should last for centuries. Check your digital media after two decades... Hard drives/floppies from 1992 are mostly gone, CD/DVDs won't last that long because of decomposition of dye. Backup tapes, good luck with that. Now, go check which sites from the 90s keep their old files (thank God for the Internet Archive). People take for granted that every bit will stay forever, that's delusional. We have to keep moving them, if everybody stops copying a content it will be lost in less than 50 years. Now, if you think that every book with stereotypes should be discarded, that's sad. We have the responsibility to preserve history, and the moral duty to challenge what we consider wrong with our reason. To wipe it off, that's censorship and a recurrent disease of totalitarian mindsets.

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#107

Post by nakkiel »

mnl wrote: post #106
nakkiel wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, download a dump of Wikipedia and be done with it. When you say "still around", you should know that digital bits have the potential to be around forever while paper books require a lot of efforts to keep around just a couple of decades. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preservation_%28library_and_arc... I have an encyclopedia that's now 120 (or so) at home and I don't read it anymore because I'm too affraid to dama…

Well, they have that potential as long as the copyright holders won't go out of business, consumers stop viewing content as disposable goods and hence keep copies... and the FBI stops closing sharing sites. Now seriously, you're wrong. I've got a book from 1640 and looks fine: as long as they're printed on acid free paper they should last for centuries. Check your digital media after two decades... Hard drives/floppi…

No matter the quality of the paper, it will eventually decay. If you can still read your book from 1640 that's really great but realistically how common is that? There are a lot of environmental factors that affect paper duration and in many areas of the world, a decade is already very long for paper (have worked with an NGO based in Thailand that has 15 years of archives; the first 5 years are hardly readable)

As I said, digital data has the potential to exist forever. Digital data is independent from the media. A media is mostly cheap and disposable.

> Now, if you think that every book with stereotypes should be discarded, that's sad.

I certainly didn't mean that (cf. "gold mine").

> We have the responsibility to preserve history, and the moral duty to challenge what we consider wrong with our reason.

My point exactly. Which is why my comment invited the op to get a data dump and archive it properly. We all know that paper is sensible and would be careful for storage. We need to build and apply a similar set of precautions to store our digital data.

> To wipe it off, that's censorship and a recurrent disease of totalitarian mindsets.

Definitely OT.

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#108

Post by [deleted] »

zrail wrote: post #10
rwmj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future is so clearly not britannica.com. That site doesn't even work without javascript, and where the heck is the "Edit" button?

Citable facts published by someone reputable are extremely important. Wikipedia is very much not that. britannica.com could very well be a citation for a wikipedia article but never the other way around.

[deleted]

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#110

Post by rickmb »

Alex3917 wrote: post #73
grellas wrote: post #31

It is easy to disparage the Encyclopedia Britannica from a modern perspective - out-of-step, overpriced, outmaneuvered by competitors - but there is a great sadness here at the demise of something that represented an effort by western scholars to "capture the world's knowledge." Imagine assembling a "A" team of scholars and scientists, getting them to make substantial, substantive contributions in each of their respe…

> there is a great sadness here at the demise of something that represented an effort by western scholars to "capture the world's knowledge." Actually the original goal wasn't to capture the world's knowledge, it was to spread the enlightenment idea that man could learn about the world through reason. If anything deciding that they would be better off just generically capturing knowledge is what killed them.

I think you've just touched upon one the most fundamental of reasons why organisations fail to adapt to social and technological change: losing sight of the original mission.

The same could be said about all those that are currently struggling with the changing times, from journalism, the music industry to democracy itself.

Post reply on HN