The Wikipedia Effect Part 1: Paul Kobasa, World Book Inc.
Posted by: David Tyckoson
The following is a summary of the presentation from Paul Kobasa of World Book Inc. Paul represents the perspective of the traditional encyclopedia publisher/editor.
World Book in a Wikipedia World
Paul A. Kobasa
Vice President, Editorial
Editor in Chief
World Book, Inc.
Conventional Criteria to Evaluate a Reference Source.
Which Still Apply Today?
• Published by a reputable, experienced, and well-established company.
• Permanent editorial and art staff.
• Editorial advisory board made up of reputable educators and scholars.
• Authoritative. Are the articles signed by credentialed contributors?
• Accurate.
• Comprehensive for the subject matter.
• Up to date.
• Written without bias.
• Written clearly and simply. Can readers easily understand the content?
• Well illustrated.
• Easy to use. Is there a liberal use of cross-references? Is pronunciation given for difficult words? Are the article titles boldly identified?
• Some articles have lists of related books to read and websites to consult.
Of the many impacts of Wikipedia, one that perhaps librarians, teachers, and reference publishers all can appreciate is the revived attention given to such aspects of reference content as authority and impartiality. Where does information end and opinion begin?
• Speaking as a publisher, the debate about the nature and relative importance of such factors has prompted us to pinpoint where we believe we “add value” to what we publish and to emphasize those elements when producing new publications and maintaining existing publications. And discussion of these factors perhaps becomes a “teachable moment” educators can use to help students become more discerning consumers of information.
• In judging which reference source is the appropriate one for a given inquiry, a consideration is the difference between efficiency and effectiveness. An information search that quickly links a questioner to an answer may appear efficient but it also is effective only if the questioner can apply the information obtained to the purpose he or she has. Consequently, such factors as reading level, internal structure, and depth of detail are taken into consideration in matching a source to a library user’s query.
• There is material of excellent quality in Wikipedia, as well as in many other Web and print resources, but an article about, say, cosmology, written on a peer-to-peer level by a cosmologist, regardless if it’s in Wikipedia or some other source, may not be effective for a seventh grader or a non-expert adult who is curious about or needs to know the basics of cosmology.
• How much information is enough? A member of World Book’s editorial board once commented that though our article about Chaos (as in chaos theory) was comparatively brief-not quite 500 words-he doubted a reader would understand the concept better if the article were longer.
• The Wikipedia Chaos article is more than 4,000 words in length. Either may be the “right” article, depending on the reader’s capabilities and needs.
• Everything there is or everything there is that matters? If the latter, who chooses? One of the criteria for inclusion of a new article or expansion of an existing article in World Book was the appearance of a subject in representative school curricula and the emphasis placed on the subject in those curricula. Today there are state and provincial curriculum and mastery standards, and the recently instituted core standards, to provide similar guidance.
• A related factor is uniformity of information, ensuring, for example, that all pertinent elements are included in every article in a category, such as articles about states or countries. What value to the end user is there in such characteristics as an overarching principal of compilation and uniformity of treatment?
• The English word encyclopedia comes from the Greek, enkyklios paideia, meaning a well-rounded education, instruction in a complete system, or circle, of learning.
• Is well-rounded or complete still the right aspiration? Given the dynamic nature of information, is either even attainable?
• The encyclopedia as a social movement. Some scholars believe that ideas in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1772) helped to inform the movement that culminated in the French Revolution. According to d’Alembert’s preface to the work, its purpose was to explain the order and relationship of all parts of human knowledge and to provide what he termed an analytical dictionary of the arts, trades, and sciences. Hardly revolutionary sounding, but the work’s attitude of tolerance, liberalism, and rationalism offended the authorities of the day and profoundly influenced the political, social, and intellectual spheres of Europe and beyond during the late 1700′s and early 1800′s. In other words, the work’s impact had as much to do with the principles that informed its compilation as it did with the content comprising it. The encyclopedias that emerged in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, in Europe and the US, both benefited from and contributed to, first, the establishment, starting in the early nineteenth century, of universal public education and, in the later 1800′s and early 1900′s, the rise of child centered education. What is Wikipedia’s chapter in this history?
Partial History of the Encyclopedia
…As We Know (Knew?) It.
• 1704—von Schütz and Hübner’s Reales Staats- und Zeitungs-Lexikon (Dictionary of Government and News)—first “modern” encyclopedia to be made up entirely of the work of many contributors
• 1704—Harris’s Lexicon Technicum, or an Universal English Dictionary of Arts and Sciences—first English-language encyclopedia to follow alphabetical order
• 1751-1772—Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Encyclopedia or Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, the Arts, and the Professions)
– Based on an English model, Ephraim Chambers’s 1728 Cyclopedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences—knowledge organized according to the three faculties of the senses, the imagination, and reason
– Publisher Le Breton censored the text, removing such articles as “Sectes du Christianisme” and “Tolérance”
– According to d’Alembert, the work’s seemingly un-revolutionary purpose was to explain the order and relationship of all parts of human knowledge and to provide an analytical dictionary of the arts, sciences, and trades
– The work’s attitude of tolerance, liberalism, and rationalism offended the authorities while profoundly influencing European political, social, and intellectual spheres
From Isidore to Wikipedia
• 623, Isidore of Seville completed his Etymologiarum libri XX (Twenty Volumes of Etymologies)—remained in use in Europe for a millennium.
• 800’s, Ibn Qutaiba’s Kitab Uyun al-Akhbar (Book of Choice Histories) is the first encyclopedia produced in Arabic.
• 1200’s, Bartholomew de Glanville, a Parisian theologian, prepared De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things) aimed at ordinary readers as well as scholars.
• 1244, Vincent of Beauvais arranged information by topics in his Speculum maius (The Bigger Mirror).
• 1403-1408, Yung-lo ta tien (Great Encyclopedia of the Yung-lo Emperor) was prepared by more than 3,000 scholars.
• 1410, Domenico Bandini used cross-references in Fons memorabilium universi (Source of Memorable Facts of the Universe).
• 1506, Raffaeli Maffei included biographies in Comentarii urbani (Urban Commentaries).
• 1541, Ringelberg of Basel was the first to use the word cyclopedia in the title of a reference work (Lucubrationes vel potius absolutissima kyklopaideia).
• 1674, Louis Moréri’s Le grand dictionnaire historique is an early example of the trend in the 1600’s toward encyclopedic works in vernacular languages.
• 1704, The Reales Staats- und Zeitungs-Lexicon was the first “modern” encyclopedia to be made up entirely of the work of many contributors.
• 1732, Johann Zedler, in his Universal Lexicon, was the first to include biographies of living persons.
• 1751, The first part of Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie appeared.
• 1768, The first part of Encyclopedia Britannica appeared.
• 1829, The first part of Encyclopedia Americana appeared.
• 1865, Pierre Larousse began Le Grand Dictionnaire.
• 1908, The British Children’s Encyclopaedia appeared.
• 1910, An American version of the Children’s Encyclopaedia appeared as The Book of Knowledge.
• 1917, The first edition of World Book (“Organized Knowledge in Story and Picture”) was published.
• 1922, The first edition of Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia appeared.
• 1935, The one-volume Columbia Encyclopedia appeared.
• 1948, The Oxford Junior Encyclopedia was published.
• 1949, The first edition of Collier’s Encyclopedia appeared.
• 1966, The New Book of Knowledge was published.
• 1967, Merit Students Encyclopedia appeared.
• 1974, A restructured Encyclopaedia Britannica appeared.
• 1980, The first edition of Academic American Encyclopedia (later also published as Grolier Academic Encyclopedia) appeared.
• 1986, The Electronic Encyclopedia, the first CD-ROM encyclopedia, appeared, based on Academic American Encyclopedia.
• 1990’s, Multimedia and online encyclopedias become popular.
• 2001, Wikipedia is launched.
