I made some clicks on the “Random article” button of Wikipedia in German, and then made a PDF of the articles. Then I estimated that one PDF page is the equivalent of two-thirds of a page of Brockhaus Enzyklopädie (the 30 volume edition of 2005/2006).
So I calculated that the 1,250,000 articles of Wikipedia in German could fill 675 Brockhaus volumes. This picture here tries to give an impression. Of course it were better if a skilled graphic artist took over the task and show a library with Wikipedias in different languages, as well other encyclopedias.
Teachers are possibly the target group number one for encyclopedias. It is teachers who consult about knowledge acquisition, and they were likely to have an encyclopedia in their home. One third of the buyers of Der Große Brockhaus in the 1950s were teachers.[1]
Harvey Einbinder mentioned already in the good old times the gap between the image and the actual content of Encyclopaedia Britannica:
‘Some teachers and professors believe it is not a reliable source of information and caution their students against blindly reproducing its material in their reports and term papers. This warning, however, has not been widely publicized. As a result, some students who obtain the set may be disappointed when they discover it does not live up to their expectations.'[2]
When I talk to teachers about Wikipedia I am amazed about the trust I meet. Many don’t hesitate to find Wikipedia very reliable, such as the previous printed encyclopedias. When we had a meeting of our Schulprojekt of Wikimedia Deutschland, we accidentally met a couple of student teachers. According to my notes, they wanted to know or answered:
How reliable is the information?
References: very very important for us. Also interesting for further reading.
We don’t want pupils to use Wikipedia as source because the paper would then be more or less complete already (if the article is good).
What about controversial issues, e.g. about bioethics? Who is writing an article, maybe someone from a company?
I don’t know about copyright and Wikipedia.
Only very few teachers check the quality in other languages.
Brockhaus: well… Maybe if you have guests you can show off with it. But it plays no role when it comes to acquire information.
Sexuality-related articles: we don’t let pupils do research about such subjects via the internet. Not suitable. They could be distracted too easily.
Nando Stöcklin in his book Wikipedia clever nutzen – in Schule und Beruf describes a future school of 2025 where pupils have a display on their internet glasses and type on a virtual keyboard. A teacher sees a pupil who is studying books. ‘Are you already finished with reading up on your subject?’ The pupil says no. The teacher: ‘But you should before starting to read books. Have an overview first, for example via Wikipedia. Otherwise you’ll drown in details.'[3]
Leipzig, gravestones of members of the Brockhaus family
The 30 volume Brockhaus Enzyklopädie, the largest print encyclopedia in German language, is history. In 2005/06 the last edition appeared, and in 2008 a short-lived online experiment failed. A year later, Bertelsmann bought Brockhaus, and even the German anti trust agency said: Yeah, it’s a monopoly, but the market for print encyclopedias has shrunk so much that the Bertelsmann monopoly would be the least problem to a newcomer.
History? Last edition? Bertelsmann now surprised the literary world with the announcement of a new edition, to be expected for 2014 or 2015. The 22nd edition will be available for tablet pc and other mobile instruments, and the buyer can order excerpts from it by print-on-demand.
We’ll see.
(According to buchreport.de, thanks to Mathias Schindler for the link.)
Which encyclopedia ever had a monopoly of knowledge?
In June 2010, the Wikipedia convention Skillshare hosted Kai Gniffke, the head of the news section of Germany’s ‘first television’ ARD. Gniffke explained about the values and goals of the ARD and recalled complains around the Kachelmann case. The weather presentator Jörg Kachelmann had been accused of rape but ARD did not report about the initial inquiries of the prosecutor (there was still no preferral of charges). This was all according to the rules of ARD, but some people accused ARD of protecting their own weatherman, abusing its monopoly of information.
Of course, such accusations have no ground. There is nothing like a monopoly of information, at least not in a free democracy. Even when ARD was the only tv station in Germany in the 1950s (a monopoly of medium), there were always newspapers.
And what about encyclopedias?People suffered from limited access to books, from illiteracy and from the fact that most books in the middle ages were in Latin, but there was no author or publisher with a ‘monopoly’: there were always several encyclopedias. This is even more true for later ages. (True: In small linguistic communities the choice was and is often very limited.)
When we think of the prototype of an encyclopedia in Germany, it is Brockhaus’ Konversations-Lexikon. In the 19th century there were actually three big encyclopedias: Brockhaus, Meyer and Pierer, later also Herder. After 1945, Brockhaus had a certain monopoly in the market section of large encyclopedias: Although the publishers lost most of their possessions in the 1943 air raid on Leipzig, and later fled to Western Germany, they saved their keyword files. Meyer lost its and had to start all over and could publish a new large encyclopedia in the late 1960s.
But in all those years, there were a number of competitors on the market section of small and medium encyclopedias. Especially in the 1970s other publishers came up with encyclopedias, for example Bertelsmann and Knaur. It was because of this competition that Brockhaus and Meyer fused in 1984, and then in 1988 with dictionary publisher Langenscheidt in response to an offer by Robert Maxwell.
In 2009, Brockhaus-Meyer-Langenscheidt had lost the battle against CD-ROM and online encyclopedias. It became a part of the media giant Bertelsmann. Then, Federal Cartel Office (the German Antitrust Agency) had to examine whether this is an impermissible market concentration. The report eventually declared that Bertelsmann indeed had a monopoly on the market of general encyclopedias but that this market has declined so much that to a new competitor this monopoly would be the least problem.
And Wikipedia? It certainly has no monopoly of knowledge. Wikipedia even makes it appallingly easy to competitors because the content is ‘free‘. Everyone can copy it and start an online encyclopedia of his own. The problem would be to create a community that expands and maintains the content. In this way one can say that Wikipedia has a monopoly on the market of online encyclopedias.
In her 2010 PhD thesis, Daniela Pscheida writes constantly about ‘the so-called online encyclopedia Wikipedia’ and ultimately explains why Wikipedia according to her is no encyclopedia. She thinks that Wikipedia misunderstood its own identity:
On the one hand, Wikipedia sees itself in the tradition of encyclopedias.
On the other hand, Wikipedia exceeds the limits of the genre encyclopedia by accepting new topics such as contemporary events.
Wikipedia to her is a database. [1]
Maybe Daniela Pscheida’s opinions relate to the fact that she describes Wikipedia quite well and extensively but (for any reason) did not notice our rule No Original Research. At the end, she even recommends that scholars establish new theories via Wikipedia, aside the traditional way of peer-review.
Whether Wikipedia is an encyclopedia or not, we can argue. About this last thing, we can’t. Sorry.
Modern encyclopedias and our concept of an encyclopedia were shaped in the 18th century. Earlier, the notion and the subject already existed, but were not linked the way we tend to do nowadays. The ancient Greek term is of uncertain etymology. Paul Scalich’s Encyclopaedia of 1539 was the first reference work to have the word in its title. [2]
Not only are there a lot of expressions for an encyclopedia, the content was very diverse and presented in different ways. Based on that, it is difficult to exclude a work from the list of encyclopedias if it does not match to what somebody has in mind.
An encyclopedia does not cover contemporary events and things? It does, this was the main intention of the original ‘Konversations-Lexika’, to capture the Zeitgeist and help the reader to participate in conversations about society and politics.
Ulrike Spree wrote that people thinking about encyclopedias don’t have a list of criteria in mind, but prototypes. In the prefaces of their works, the authors or publishers file their work in the tradition of encyclopedias, using other encyclopedias as model or as counter-example. Wikipedia is not different.
Who was the biggest Wikipedia critic?
For example, it seems to be more common in Germany than in the English-speaking world that readers complain about the length of Wikipedia articles. According to them, an encyclopedia consists of rather short articles. This may relate to the fact that in the German-speaking world the most popular traditional encyclopedia was Brockhaus, a short-article-encyclopedia.
In 2005, the German language Wikipedians had a discussion about footnotes, whether to use them in articles. Several of them said that footnotes are not used in an encyclopedia. Again, it depends on the historical model you follow.
In 2007 German Stern magazine presented a close comparison of Brockhaus and Wikipedia, in which Wikipedia appeared to be the better encyclopedia, Klaus Holoch said that the Wikipedia principle is interesting. But Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia (‘Lexikon’), he claimed, because it is gratuitous and unchecked.
Incidentally, Klaus Holoch was the chief sales representative of Brockhaus.
[1] Daniela Pscheida: Das Wikipedia-Universum. Wie das Internet unsere Wissenskultur verändert. transcript, Bielefeld 2010, pp. 442-446.
[2] Ulrike Spree: Das Streben nach Wissen. Eine vergleichende Gattungsgeschichte der populären Enzyklopädie in Deutschland und Großbritannien im 19. Jahrhundert, Niemeyer 2000, p. 17/18.
If you are interested in Wikipedia, you may know the motto of Jimmy Wales:
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.
I was always afraid that this phrase supports misunderstandings about Wikipedia. Not all human knowledge is suitable for Wikipedia, like the name of your pet. But now I found out that Jimmy’s phrase is absolutely nothing uncommon for an encyclopedia. Take Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example (15th ed., vol. 18, p. 258):
Today, most people think of an encyclopedia as a multivolume compendium of all available knowledge.
Or Brockhaus Enzyklopädie (19th ed., vol 6, p. 451):
In der Neuzeit wird der Versuch unternommen, die Gesamtheit menschlichen Wissens in einem neuen, dem gewandelten Weltbild entsprechenden Zusammenhang […] darzustellen. / (My translation:) In the Modern Age, one tried to present […] the total of human knowledge in a new context, according to the changed conception of the world.
So if Jimmy’s phrase is not mistakable, it is at least not so inventive. At the occasion of the 10th anniversary, maybe the Wikipedians want to find (collaboratively) a new,and shorter, slogan.
Teachers are possibly the target group number one for encyclopedias. It is teachers who consult about knowledge acquisition, and they were likely to have an encyclopedia in their home. One third of the buyers of Der Große Brockhaus in the 1950s were teachers.[1]
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