If You Liked Britannica, You'll Love Wikipedia (original) (raw)

Phoebe Ayers, a reference librarian at the University of California, Davis, and a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation, is a co-author of "How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It."

Updated March 14, 2012, 6:59 PM

There is something about a shelf of encyclopedia volumes — a bit musty, the pages dog-eared and slick — that promises, in A-to-Z glory, all of knowledge in a single package. It is an intensely satisfying completeness. The encyclopedia introduces new topics, distills big ideas, and shows the diversity and breadth of human experience to those who might otherwise have only a narrow slice available to them.

The possibility of intimately knowing a vast world: that is why we read encyclopedias, and why we write them, too.

I love print encyclopedias, and will miss the printed Encyclopaedia Britannica, with its innovative organization and gorgeous color plates. But we live in a complex world, too big for a few hundred people to cover completely, and too fast-moving for print volumes to keep up. That is where Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, has found a place. It is an open community where tens of thousands of writers edit articles, and discuss style and content, in a perpetual asynchronous editorial meeting. In 11 years, this has yielded a reference that is hundreds of times larger than Britannica (or any encyclopedia), with editions in over 200 languages, and freely available online. Nearly half a billion people read Wikipedia every month.

At Wikimedia, we “imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.” That vision is not possible without both the Internet and the tools it affords us, and the dedication and goodwill of Wikipedia editors all around the globe. Wikipedia isn’t perfect, or close to finished — but every “citation needed” tag and “red link” is an invitation to you, too, to edit and contribute. Knowing that we can’t do it alone, Wikipedia is freely licensed under a Creative Commons license — anyone can take our work, revise it and redistribute it.

We need encyclopedias. The need has never been greater for accurate, accessible summaries of complex topics. But it makes sense for this essentially innovative format to keep up with available technology. When I read the news about Britannica, I went to the shelf and pulled down a volume: 23, from “Light” to “Metabolism.” It was heavy and awkward and beautiful, a masterpiece. But what matters is the promise of knowledge that it represents.

I asked other Wikipedia editors about Britannica’s ceasing print; were print encyclopedias as meaningful to them as they were to me growing up? Almost everyone replied they too had loved encyclopedias. One wrote: “I got the same feeling from them I now recognize from Wikipedia — the tingly and powerful sense that I could look up almost anything and find out all kinds of cool details, vast amounts of information just waiting to be absorbed.”

Curiosity, and the possibility of intimately knowing a vast world: that is why we read encyclopedias, and why we write them, too.

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