Amazing infographic digging into the size and scope of Wikipedia, especially as it relates to its use in schools. Interesting to see the decline in the number of teachers who prohibit the use of Wikipedia in research.
Via: Open-Site.org
Via OpenSite
Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
I didn’t make it past the first ‘frame’ of this infographic without getting pissed off.. :)
“Wikipedia has forced EB to stop the presses after 244 years of print”
Let’s not pretend this is Wikipedia’s fault or action. It is simply the entire idea of a print encyclopedia has been archaic for decades now. I graduated High School in 1995, and the last time I used a print encyclopedia was well before then, perhaps my freshman year.
The MOMENT I had access to CD-ROM or online encyclopedias I never looked back at print. And it had nothing to do with multimedia or any such thing, it was being able to search quickly for the information I was looking for, as opposed to hunting down the appropriate volume (or using the index volume) to try and chisel the mountain of paper into something I could manage.
It isn’t Wikipedia that killed print encyclopedias, it is the Internet. If Wikipedia wasn’t dreamed up, people would still prefer searching online for answers to their questions as it is a more pleasant experience as well as something you can do from anywhere.
Add to that the elimination of length limits (paper and ink is expensive, but online the article can be as long as it ‘needs’ to be) as well as multimedia elements, and the case against print encyclopedias is closed. I remember having to do a paper in middle school about a composer, and thinking back to the bubble I was living in, reading encyclopedia articles without sound is astonishing.
Sorry for the rant… :)
Sean, you’re right that the first frame gets that part totally wrong. Funny, my eye didn’t actually “see” that bit – I got caught up in the other stats (which are still interesting even if the first point made is wrong).
Wired had a good piece the other day about how Encarta was really the end of the paper encyclopedia. It was already over before Wikipedia came along.