What Future for Traditional Encyclopedias in the Age of Wikipedia
What Future for Traditional Encyclopedias in the Age of Wikipedia - scientific work related to Wikipedia quality published in 2014, written by Michael Upshall.
Overview
The launch and rapid domination of Wikipedia as a reference tool for the Internet was as dramatic as it was unexpected. Wikipedia broke so many of the rules of reference publishing, which, even if not formally codified, had been widely accepted for many years: the use of (usually named) authorities as expert contributors, and the presence of moderating editors to ensure balanced structure. All this appeared to have been swept away with Wikipedia, and, not least because Wikipedia content is given away rather than sold, the competition between Wikipedia and most generalpurpose encyclopedias was a sad and rather one-sided affair. One by one the existing commercial print general encyclopedias admitted defeat; among the latest is Brockhaus, the leading German encyclopedia brand, which ended publication early in 2013. Of course, scholars and critics have commented on and frequently condemned the Wikipedia editorial model (many of them summarised in Wikipedia’s own article ‘Criticism of Wikipedia’ (Wikipedia 2014b), but paradoxically, the greatest threat to Wikipedia as the default reference source for general information is, Author believe, the very technology that brought it into being: the Internet, in its latest incarnation as the Semantic Web. For those unfamiliar with the Semantic Web, it can be defined as ‘the exchange of information on the Web via machine-processable data’ (Cambridge Semantics 2014), although there are many other, more elaborate and often less precise definitions. What is described as a ‘Semantic Web’ below is simply the use of automatic tools to pull together content that is more or less related around a common topic. In this paper Author examine some of the claimed strengths of Wikipedia compared to traditional print encyclopedias, and examine them in light of Semantic Web developments.
