On Wed, 17 Nov 2010 23:59:26 -0800, Julie Bove wrote:

> I do know that Encyclopaedia Britannica only allows you to view so much and
> after that they want to charge you. Now I would be fine with this if you
> could pay for say...a week at a time. But they want you to sign up for a
> year or two and pay for it weekly.

A bound set of encyclopedias costs about $1,000 and is out of date
before it's printed. Wiki contains 1,000+ times more information
than any bound or even online volumes. And it's just as accurate,
except on the more mundane topics.

The technology behind wiki is quite elaborate - much more so than
IMDB's which was the first notable collaborate effort of Internet
volunteers (Usenet). Until all the contributors got screwed when
it was sold to Amazon for marketing purposes. It takes money to
host servers and develop these things. And they also give away a
subset of the technology used to host their site.

It's more valuable than PBS (who has many corporate sponsors).
Consider donating that weekly fee, or just 1% of what you'd pay for
a set of encyclopedias to Wikimedia. There is no single more
valuable source of updated, referenced, and linked information
anywhere.

For example, you won't find this in any printed encyclopedia (at
least not my 1956 World Book of Knowledge):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis

The list of paraphilias is worth at least $15. I haven't even got
past the "A's" yet.

-sw