EchoDitto Blog

Old Media vs. New

posted by Garrett Graff
September 7, 2004 - 4:50pm

We've been talking a lot about wikis in recent client meetings, so I was particularly interested to read this blog entry today on the Wikipedia vs. the Encyclopedia Brittanica (via BoingBoing.net):

Princeton University: Both entries are accurate and reasonably well written. Wikipedia has more information. Verdict: small advantage to Wikipedia.

Me: Wikipedia has a short but decent entry; Britannica, unsurprisingly, has nothing. Verdict: advantage Wikipedia.

Public-key cryptography: Good, accurate entries in both. Verdict: toss-up.

Microsoft antitrust case: Britannica has only two sentences, saying that Judge Jackson ruled against Microsoft and ordered a breakup, and that the Court of Appeals overturned the breakup but agreed that Microsoft had broken the law. That's correct, but it leaves out the settlement. Wikipedia's entry is much longer but error-prone. Verdict: big advantage to Britannica.

Overall verdict: Wikipedia's advantage is in having more, longer, and more current entries. If it weren't for the Microsoft-case entry, Wikipedia would have been the winner hands down. Britannica's advantage is in having lower variance in the quality of its entries.

My question: Who wants to write the Wikipedia entry on Nicco?

Garrett Graff's blog
( categories: In The News | Wiki )

Wiki is all over the blogs today!

Ross Mayfield writes about anonymity and privacy for Wiki-editors.

and Joi Ito has this completely incomprehensible graph titled "Wikipedia heals in five minutes"

Submitted by Tim Jones on September 7, 2004 - 5:27pm.

For me wiki's have 2 components.

1. They are editable by anyone, hence their advantages.

2. They require knowing the formatting language (which is similar to HTML).

Hence, my recommendation of Drupal/DeanSpace/CivicSpace "books" over wikis because they make participation more accessible. They allow the same editing/collaboration functions but you can turn on the htmlarea module to give people a WYSIWYG interface. However, you might not want to lower the bar to the point where anyone online can probably participate because of the downside Garrett cited - inaccuracies. It depends on the project which one makes more sense. To me, for an encyclopedia, the world should stick to wikis but for internal client usage books would make more sense.

Submitted by Alison on September 7, 2004 - 11:39pm.

We were just talking about Wikis vs Books in CivicSpace IRC.

The big difference is that a Book is hierarchically organized-- each page has a parent and a number of children. Where a Wiki is more "flat"- there's no inherent structure to guide how pages link to one another.

So you could make a WYIWYG wiki. If you can pronounce it with a straight face.

Submitted by Tim Jones on September 8, 2004 - 10:44am.