Said you were smart, said it would just take a day of your time.

No-one will ever start a serious general encyclopedia again on the “one smart person writes the whole thing” (Aristotle, Pliny the Elder) or “a bunch of smart people write the whole thing” (Britannia, Brockhaus) models — they’ll use wikis and massive collaboration.

In fact, no-one will ever start a serious specialist encyclopedia on the one-smart-person or bunch-of-smart-people models again, because wikis already do the job much better, much faster.

For general encyclopedias the earlier models are already economically unviable; for specialist encyclopedias they’re not only unviable but just can’t produce as useful results nearly as quickly.

(I haven’t posted this month because Freda has been keeping me busy. No, she doesn’t have a Wikipedia login yet.)

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