How much does Encarta make for MS?
Wikipedia used for libel.
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geni
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I don't think they give out figures. I don't think it matters since I suspect it exists mostly to bost the microsoft brand rather than make money. We know that microsoft has not been able to mentian all the encarta editions which suggests less than vast profits.
Evidence, please. Which "conspiracy wakos?" When?
geni
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Around the time of the assasination. The guy was closely connected to the kennedys so it would something of a suprise if his name wasn't mantioned in conspirocy circles.
LibraryLady
Emeritus
I'm sorry, I can't stand it anymore. Mentioned. Conspiracy. Kennedy with a capital K. Assassination.
I feel better now.
geni
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No it was mentioned by someone else
I conceed that I don't have any primiary sources showing this.
Then someone else made it up and you repeated it.
Mojo
Mostly harmless
It all depends on what you are going to use it for. I don't use Wikipedia as a reference source because the information isn't reliable enough or often (as is the case with encyclopedias generally) not detailed enough. On the other hand, it is an extremely useful research tool, especially for subjects I'm not particularly familiar with. There's generally enough there to get me pointed in the right direction, either via the links or by providing useful search terms or related subjects.
geni
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It's a posibilty. Equaly it is a posibilty that it was a localised thing that died out before the internet took off.
Of course worldnetdaily does try an involve him in their Gore could be blackmailed thing but I don't think they got very far.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=17675
geni
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Why would you use any encyclopedia (asside from a few very specialist ones) as a reference?
My use of an encyclopedia is more or less directly related to the degree of trustworthiness of the information it contains. (Completeness of information is an important, but secondary, consideration.)
How do you know that (written) information is trustworthy? The most reliable method that humans have yet found is expert review. All other things being equal, an encyclopedia with articles written by experts and reviewed by experts is more trustworthy than an encyclopedia where articles are written by any lunkhead with an opinion.
Similarly, all other things being equal, an encyclopedia where expert review is mandatory is more reliable than one where it's optional. It's similarly more reliable if the expertise among the authors/reviewers is mandatory instead of optional.
I'm surprised at how many Wiki-theologians don't understand these simple observations.
geni
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I'm yet to run into an excyopedia completely writen by experts. EB is contians many articles based on the 1911 lot which were to a large degree writen by generalists. Encarta (which has pretty much killed off everything else) is based on the Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedia which I'm not aware of being writen solely by experts
You have no test case to base this on. The OED was to a large degree based on public submissions to that part of the idea is sound. That just leaves the review stage. We will see how that works out.
LibraryLady
Emeritus
Thank you, Dr. As to who else would want to use an encyclopedia? People who do not have degrees might want to gather a little information on a subject they are not familiar with. People with degrees in one area might want to gather some information in another area. School kids might want to get information for their term papers. Autodidacts might just thirst for knowledge. Librarians might want a quick reliable source to help any of the above.
I have thousands. Have you ever heard of vanity presses? There's a reason that few serious scholars take vanity presses seriously, and that so few libraries carry their works. In the scholarly community, the quality of a work is often judged initially by the quality of the publisher (which is why books accepted at major presses like Harvard, Cambridge, and OUP are blue chips in the eternal game of tenure Hold'em).
Sure, there's nothing to prevent me from publishing a very good book through a very small or vanity press. But there's also nothing to prevent someone else from publishing a very bad book through that same press. The signal to noise ratio is much better at a high-end publisher with a very tight review system, and everyone in the business knows and relies on it.
Similarly, journals are graded partly by the quality of their review boards. I can get any paper I like published somewhere (and many pseudoscholars do), but almost no one takes publications in a "vanity journal" seriously. The ones that people read, and cite, and remember, are the ones published in Nature, and Science, and so forth. Nothing is keeping me from publishing a very good article in the Northeastern Yorkshire Homeopathic Society Gazette, but no one will read it, because it will likely be published next to some piece of excrable drek.
So why does expert review have such a marked impact on the quality of books? Why does expert review have such a marked impact on the quality of journal articles? And why is an encyclopedia somehow immune to this effect?
Well, you've got me, and Dr. A., and Shanek, and a number of other people who are acting as your informal review board so far. You don't really have a copy-editor (although LibraryLady, IIRC, is pretty good and active at that), which is part of why so many typos and stuff are getting by.
Do you trust our expertise? Do you trust our diligence? Do you trust our ability to stay atop things?
In my experience, we've done an okay job so far of weeding out the total drek (e.g., "No True Skeptic") and a number of people are doing all right at the egregious spam. If you trust the informal review board you've put together, you should be okay as long as the Skepticwiki doesn't grow out of control to the point where the reviewers can't, won't , or simply don't review.
At that point, you will have a problem. I trust Dr Adequate (e.g.) and his judgement; but a review is only as good as the knowledge of the reviewer. If Dr Adequate can't do it, and the new person whom you recruit isn't as knowledgeable, the article quality will go downhill.
Mine have been multiplied about a thousandfold when she just blandly re-libled Seigenthaler as a defense to Wikipedia's inexcusable lapse. It's a good thing Mojo didn't come across Seigenthaler's name in the past few months and "pointed in the right direction."
The key is to keep is sufficiently small that you and yours can maintain editorial oversight. As it gets bigger, "you and yours" will have to grow, too, or you'll lose control over the quality. You'll want to recruit trusted people to review each and every thing in it and that group will have to grow over time.
Mojo
Mostly harmless
Well, I didn't, but if I had I doubt that I would have found anything confirming the story. I wouldn't use anything from Wikipedia if it didn't check out. In fact, I wouldn't cite it at work at all.
Good point, and that's the weird and pernicious thing about Wikipedia. The more popular a subject, a) the more people are editing it and the more likely it is to be (at least essentially correct, and b) the easier it is to find independent information about the subject. What all that ends up meaning is that the more necessary it is to have an article at all the less likely it is to be correct.