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A person reading Wikipedia

For as long, and longer still then there has been Wikipedia, it has had competition. This article attempts to take a brief look at the competition facing Wikipedia. (technically speaking, Wikipedia has no competitors, but the rest of the world seems to think otherwise.)

Overview

Wikipedia is by far one of the largest of these encyclopedias listed below. On Alexa Internet, a company that provides commercial web traffic data and analytics, Wikipedia is ranked the highest, at #5 worldwide. Baike.com comes next, at 476. Encyclopedia Brittanica comes next closest, at around 2,000. Infogalactic is at 53,896. Conservapedia falls even lower, at 72,189. Baidu Baike ranks higher than Wikipedia, as the site Alexa counts is the search engine (baidu.com) rather than the encyclopedia (baike.baidu.com)

Wikipedia is also far larger than most of these encyclopedias. The few that fall ahead in article count are so-called 'dynamic forks' of Wikipedia, such as Infogalactic (the only exceptions are Baike.com, and Baidu Baike which are validly larger).

One might ask, "why, if there are so many other, sometimes larger encyclopedias, why is Wikipedia larger?" The encyclopedias that are not Wikipedia have several main differences that, in my opinion are why they do not succeed. Some of these encyclopedias are far too restrictive. Encyclopedias such as Veropedia, Nupedia, and Citizendium sought to end the problem with reliability in Wikipedia. However, they were too restrictive, oftentimes only allowing experts to edit, and driving away content creators. In the end, they struggle to get work done, and eventually progress slowed down. Even to some extent, Intergalactica and Conservapedia require accounts to be requested, and then approved to edit. Many of these encyclopedias also struggled due to too little reliability. The referencing in Conservapedia and others is almost nonexistent. Some encyclopedias failed due to poor responses to vandalism. Susning.nu was growing great, but the owner shut the site down due to vandalism, instead of keeping it up. Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español failed due to its lack of permanency. It served to pressure the Spanish Wikipedia to change, and it did that. In the words of its creator, Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español "was not intended to last. It was merely a form of pressure. Some of the goals were achieved, not all of them, but it was worth the cost."

This is just a brief snapshot of other online encyclopedias. This is by no means a complete list It would be quite an endeavor to list every single other encyclopedia. There is even an encyclopedia for Pizzagate. Just Pizzagate.

Main

Print Encyclopedias

Encyclopedias, more specifically ones in print have been around for about 2,000 years. In the heyday of print encyclopedias, (through out the 19th, and throughout most of the 20th centuries) print encyclopedias served as essentially the only way to easily find reliable information quickly, much the same purpose as Wikipedia serves today. And serve that purpose they did. Many encyclopedias regularly sold editions of over 100,000 copies, with some reportedly reaching 500,000. But all that is good does not last, and with the advent of digital encyclopedias (like the one you are reading now) eventually most print encyclopedias stopped their presses.

Encyclopædia Britannica

Perhaps the most widely publicised fall of an encyclopedia is that of the Encyclopædia Britannica. The first edition of the encyclopedia was printed around 1771. Sales were small, at a mere 1,500 copies. As the years wore on, Encyclopædia Britannica entered the golden age of encyclopedias. Sales of the 9th and 11th editions were through the roof, in the hundreds of thousands. The 11th edition in particular is hailed:

The eleventh edition of Encyclopedia Britannica

"[The 11th edition] was probably the finest edition of the Britannica ever issued, and it ranks with the Enciclopedia Italiana and the Espasa as one of the three greatest encyclopaedias. It was the last edition to be produced almost in its entirety in Britain, and its position in time as a summary of the world's knowledge just before the outbreak of World War I is particularly valuable". Robert Collison, Encyclopaedias: Their History Throughout The Ages (1966)

"One leaps from one subject to another, fascinated as much by the play of mind and the idiosyncrasies of their authors as by the facts and dates. It must be the last encyclopaedia in the tradition of Diderot which assumes that information can be made memorable only when it is slightly coloured by prejudice. When T. S. Eliot wrote 'Soul curled up on the window seat reading the Encyclopædia Britannica,' he was certainly thinking of the eleventh edition." Sir Kenneth Clark, Another Part of the Wood (1974)

It was only downhill from there. In 1990, the encyclopedia had sales of 120,000 sets. With the creation of online, free encyclopedias, sales dropped to 12,000 in 2012. It was then that Encyclopædia Britannica, after more than 7 million sets sold across 244 years and 15 editions, the encyclopedia stopped its presses and went entirely online, citing Wikipedia as one of the major reasons for the switch.

Citizendium

Citizendium. The self proclaimed " citizens' compendium of everything" was originally founded by Larry Sanger, the Co-founder of Wikipedia. Sanger grew critical of Wikipedia, especially the lacking of credibility, and respect for expertise. Growth occurred slowly, and never really took off. Now, it is essentially dormant.

Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español

This project began as a fork of the Spanish Wikipedia for a few reasons

• Perceived expectation that Wikipedia would soon start hosting advertisements.
• Non-English Wikipedias were running older, less featured versions of MediaWiki. When national groups offered help in software development and maintenance, access to the servers was denied.
• The downloadable database dumps of Wikipedia content were highly outdated.
• Wikipedia was hosted on a .com rather than a .org domain.

The Encyclopedia grew rapidly, at first outpacing the Spanish Wikipedia, but growth has largely stalled, and the Spanish Wikipedia is now about 23 times as large

Veropedia

Perhaps the most common complaint about Wikipedia is reliability, or rather lack thereof. Like Citizendium, Veropedia (launched in 2007) aimed to address this issue. However, unlike the expert driven model of Citizendium, Veropedia's model revolved around finding reliable articles in Wikipedia, and importing them to Veropedia. The site grew to encompass almost 6,000 articles before being taken down. (a new model was promised, but has yet to come).

Interpedia

One of the earliest proposed internet encyclopedias, Interpedia dates back to 1993 and never really left the planning phase. After being descussed for a few months, the growth of the world wide web signaled the end of the idea.

Nupedia

Nupedia is now mainly looked at as the predecessor to Wikipedia, however, restrictions on the creation of articles really restricted growth, as in the first year Nupedia produced slightly over 1/10 of the number of pages created by Wikipedia in a month. By the time it was shut down, Nupedia only had 25 articles.

Conservapedia

Conservapedia is an English-language wiki encyclopedia project written from an American conservative point of view. The website was started in 2006 by American homeschool teacher and attorney Andrew Schlafly. It is similar to Infogalactic, but aimed towards, as the name suggests, Conservatives. It was formed claiming that Wikipedia is liberal biased, especially regarding acheivments by Christianity and conservitivism. It also tries to be more family-freindly. However, it is incredibly biased and on many cases downright wrong or has opinion-based statements. They gain criticism from fellow Christian conservatives for their Conservative Bible Project. We should remember that some of this this critism may be valid and make sure that our articles do not have bias against ANY groups including conservatives and Christians. Otherwise people may start getting there information from Conservepedia. That's something none of us want.

Infogalactic

Founded by Vox Day, as a alternative to the Wikipedia he sees as controlled “by the left-wing thought police who administer it,” Infogalactic is basically a "Wikipedia of the Alt-Right"

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

A 2017 Quartz article highlighted the successes of this encyclopedia, stating that "This free online encyclopedia has achieved what Wikipedia can only dream of." Edward Zalta launched the encyclopedia in 1995, with two entries. Now it has about 1,500 entries, and has been called “comparable in scope, depth and authority” to the biggest philosophy encyclopedias by the American Library Association’s Booklist review. Zalta planned to address an age old problem in starting the encyclopedia, saying in a 2002 paper "A fundamental problem faced by the general public and the members of an academic discipline in the information age is how to find the most authoritative, comprehensive, and up-to-date information about an important topic." The way the encyclopedia works is thus: To become and stay reliable, multiple subject editors—in charge of topics like “ancient philosophy” or “formal epistemology”—find more specific topics in need of coverage, and request a qualified philosopher to write an article on that topic. If the philosopher accepts the request, the philosopher sends an outline of the article to the pertinent subject editors. “An editor works with the author to get an optimal outline before the author begins to write,” says Susanna Siegel. “Sometimes there is a lot of back and forth at this stage.” Editors may also reject entries (although this rarely occurs, it is often due to biased pieces). In order to keep the article up to date, every four years (or sooner) an updated version of the article must be submitted.

Susning.nu

The logo of Swedish wiki Susning.nu.

The Finnish Wiki began in 2001, as an encyclopedia anyone could edit. In April 2004, Susning had over 60,000 articles on various topics, which was more than any other Swedish wiki at that time. In its first few years it was in direct competition with the Swedish Wikipedia. However, because of the website's popularity, Susning was highly affected by vandals. In attempt at preventing vandalism, many efforts were made by Susning's founder Lars Aronsson, which were mostly unsuccessful. In 2009, the encyclopedia was shut down inexplicably. Susning did not have any voluntary administrators who could assist in blocking vandals; the only person who could do that on Susning was Lars Aronsson. As Susning grew, the issue with vandalism became bigger. In December 2003, Susning was affected by a vandal who had automatized their activity through a script. In just a few minutes, thousands of articles were deleted. Eventually, Aronsson announced that the editing abilities would be shut down until a solution to the vandalism issues had been found, and that a password system would be imposed. No details were given for the time being. Soon, Susning became a more inactive project, and a dozen users made almost all edits. In March 2004, before the password system was imposed, articles were saved approximately 36,000 times. In May, articles were saved approximately 1,600 times, which is just a few percent of the activity in March 2004. On May 11, 2004, editing on Susning.nu was temporarily opened for non-logged in users as well. But after just 18 hours, vandalism had once again become such a big problem that the ability for non-logged in editing was once again shut down. In mid-2008, the website was affected by a persistent spammer who used proxy servers to spam different articles with English advertisement links. In April 2009, this forced Aronsson to remove the daily editing abilities between 06:00–07:00. The editing abilities during Sunday afternoons, however, continued to be open despite returning spam attacks. In April 2009, very few users still created and edited articles on the website. In August, the website was taken down entirely.

Baike.com

Baike.com is a for-profit social network in China, including the world's largest Chinese encyclopedia/news website. It is China's largest wiki site, using paid advertising, with over 7 million articles and more than 5 million volunteers, as of April 2013. However, Baike.com is a news/neologism encyclopedia, and hence, it does not restrict articles to only long-term, sourced text with balanced point-of-view content. The contributors agree to release their writings with perpetual royalty-free license to publish their content, but it is not free for re-use on other websites. As of January 2017, it had more than 16.00 million articles. The website is inspired by Wikipedia, and it's founders and Wikipedia's have explicitly supported the two sites continued collaboration.

Baidu Baike

Baidu Baike is a Chinese-language, collaborative, web-based encyclopedia owned and produced by the Chinese search engine Baidu. Its test version was released on 20 April 2006, and within three weeks the encyclopedia had grown to more than 90,000 articles surpassing the number in Chinese Wikipedia. By 2008, Hudong.com had surpassed both in article count, but Baidu Baike later became number one again. The encyclopedia censors its content in accordance with the requirements of the Chinese government. As of August 2017, Baidu Baike has approximately 15 million articles. Baidu states officially that Baidu Baike serves as an online encyclopedia as well as information storage space for netizens. Baidu Baike claims "equality", "cooperation", "sharing" and "freedom" spiritually, and connect this online platform with search engines technically in order to fulfil the needs of the users for information of different levels.When searching with the search engine Baidu, the link of the corresponding entry in Baidu Baike, if exists, will be put as the first result or one of the first results

https://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/after-244-years-encyclopaedia-britannica-stops-the-presses/ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/mar/16/encyclopedia-britannica-sum-of-human-knowledge https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/mar/14/encyclopedia-britannica-wikipedia http://money.cnn.com/2012/03/13/technology/encyclopedia-britannica-books/index.htm https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/encyclopaedia-britannica-goes-out-of-print-wont-be-missed/254529/ http://www.webcitation.org/5Nc9GOr3r?url=http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/2007-03-25-wikipedia-alternative_N.htm

One Word

"Fulfilling" - SAdN "'Distracting"-SB "awesomeness-riveting-rewarding-great-colaboration"-B "potlatch" -B