[10527] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Schools and the NII
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dick St.Peters)
Sat Feb 26 16:51:11 1994
Date: Sun, 13 Feb 94 14:57:33 EST
From: stpeters@spare-parts.crd.ge.com (Dick St.Peters)
To: STAPLETON@bpa.arizona.edu, bzs@world.std.com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
Reply-To: <stpeters@dawn.crd.ge.com>
> From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
> What ties the two thoughts together? The possible result and the
> spending of money? That's pretty thin, few efforts are more work than
> decent encyclopaedias. There's a reason most of them are on the order
> of 100 years old and people don't just go jumping into the biz.
>
> For one thing, where do you get your facts on the zillion little
> things that need to go into an encyclopaedia?
Uh, Barry, you were on pretty firm ground aguing about government
competing with business, and you should have stayed there.
No encylopaedia is 100 years old; the company and the name may be, but
the encyclopaedia itself is a dynamic thing, a collection of articles
on topics by experts. They are mostly rewritten for each edition,
mostly by new experts writing for a new context. The impressive thing
about them is not how much information they contain but how little they
contain while still presenting the essence of the topics. The art of
an encyclopaedia is the art of information distillation.
If the encyclopaedia companies can produce what is effectively a new
encyclopaedia for each edition, they could do the same in producing a
government encyclopaedia under contract.
The issue isn't whether the governement could creat an encyclopaedia,
the issue is whether it should.
Ross, the encyclopedia problem is not existence but access. Your
government encyclopaedia would have to be just as dynamic to be worth
the effort, so you'd have to be funding maintenance. Why not apply
that outlay of public funds to providing access to what the private
sector already does a good job of creating? There should be a way
here to increase access to a competing and counter-balancing mixture
of online encyclopaedias in a way that looks to the encyclopaedia
people like a larger market and to the kids like a bigger library.
--
Dick St.Peters, Gatekeeper
The Pearly Gateway; currently at:
GE Corporate R&D, Schenectady, NY stpeters@dawn.crd.ge.com
