Word: britannica
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...feature. Wikipedia is a free open-source encyclopedia, which basically means that anyone can log on and add to or edit it. And they do. It has a stunning 1.5 million entries in 76 languages-and counting. Academics are upset by what they see as info anarchy. (An Encyclopaedia Britannica editor once compared Wikipedia to a public toilet seat because you don't know who used it last.) Loyal Wikipedians argue that collaboration improves articles over time, just as free open-source software like Linux and Firefox is more robust than for-profit competitors because thousands of amateur programmers...
Meanwhile, as the WikiWikiWeb was chugging along happily in semi-obscurity, Wales was looking for a way to combine his life's two major hobbies. As a home-schooled child growing up in Huntsville, Ala., he loved to spend his free hours getting lost in Britannica or the World Book. Then there was the Internet, which Wales stumbled across in college as early as 1989. "I met all these great people online," he says, "and we were all discussing things on mailing lists no one ever looks at. I thought, Why not use the smarts of my friends and build...
...verbatim from other sources without any attribution. The site includes a 69-word section on Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler that is identical to an article in the computerized encyclopedia Microsoft Encarta, as well as a 46-word passage on Euler that appears to have been copied straight from Encyclopedia Britannica. The site also published a 65-word passage that previously appeared verbatim in a 1997 law review article on cryptography...
...invective to his weblog slamming court citations of Wikipedia as absurd given the nature of the source, but the most florid prose on the subject comes perhaps from Robert McHenry, chief of the (less and less popular—let’s keep our private interests straight) Encyclopedia Britannica. McHenry has compared Wikipedia to a public restroom: Such a facility may be obviously dirty, he has said, or it may look quite clean, but either way one has no real way of knowing who used it last...
BOOKS: The Know-It-All is A.J. Jacobs' very funny summary of the Encyclopaedia Britannica...