Not Your Father's Encyclopedia
Kendra Mayfield,
Wired News,
Jan 28, 2003
What could be Britannica's major competition is not published by World Book or any other corporation. It's not published by anyone: it is the free and open source Wikipedia, a collection that has just reached its 100,000th article. The Wikipedia is the work of thousands of volunteer authors. Anyone may volunteer to submit an article and anyone may edit an existing article. It sounds chaotic and disorganized, and not at all authoritative in the manner of the traditional enclyclopedia. But the articles - those I reviewed, at any rate - are surprisingly good. And perhaps it's time we got over this need for an authority figure in any case. It's our language, and Wikipedia should be our enclyclopedia.
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