Re: There was always a near monopoly on encyclopedic knowledge
"Wikipedia is far from perfect but is still a brilliant example of how the internet is better and providing timely, wide ranging and free information with no noticeable drop in quality."
As always there's the question of your definition of quality...
As Wikipedia is now, it is completely incomparable to an old-style encyclopedia to begin with. The dead-tree varieties were all heavily constricted by available real estate, which web pages, by their nature are not. Where an old encyclopedia could just about manage to give the highlights on a subject, and some sources for more specialised reading, an average wikipedia page displays the gist of a subject plus the remainder of "established" available literature on the subject. .
So if you must compare accuracy, you will have to take the factual accuracy of the rest of the "authoritative" publications that were part of the condensed encyclopedia entry into account as well, given that those are an integral part of the bulk of the wikipedia entries. If you don't you're effectively comparing apples and oranges. Not a Good Thing...
Even then you're not even considering the update cycle.. Classic dead-tree ( if you could afford it) published 3-4 Addenda a year, a new Edition every other year, at best... Wikipedia's cycle, for good or for bad, is slightly longer than the actual speed of Editing. Somewhere between two minutes and a day for most articles..
Biting the hand that feeds IT
