I would put Amazon into that class, except they really provide very little useful author information;very disappointing.

It might be interesting to compare these projects.

I’d suggest that in most academic settings, a citation of Britannica would be no less frowned upon, unless it were in the context of the encyclopaedia as a historical primary text—i.e. the Thirteenth Edition’s entry on psychoanalysis, written by a certain S. Freud.

The point of an encylopaedia is to set you on your way, ideally in the right direction. And Wikipedia seems fairly good at that task.

I’ve been wondering when somebody – Google or Microsoft – would set up an edited edition of Wikipedia.

I believe that ‘Jimbo’ Wales has proposed ‘version freezes’ along the lines of software versioning that could be categorised as ‘editions’ and released in some form.

Sausages, by the way, have been unhappily given a bad name over the years. They are often good.

I’m a former grad student in linguistics, and a native Northern Californian of the appropriate age, and even someone who has researched intensifiers and probably conversant with all of the sparse published linguistics literature on “hella”. As you might expect, the authentic examples in the current incarnation of the entry are mostly my work, as is the sole link to an abstract. I had to fight to save (something like) my part-of-speech classification, but have given up on getting rid of some clear errors. (Most notably the belief—by outsiders or by linguistically ignorant insiders—that “hella” can be described as a contraction of “hell of a”. The syntactic positions in which they can occur are too profoundly different. Far more likely is an extension of the construction that many other dialects share in “sorta” and “kinda”.)

But what gets me the most is what happened to a brief sociolinguistic passage I wrote, referencing two cases of stigma: a “South Park” episode where the obnoxious Eric Cartman annoys the other kids (in Colorado, if you didn’t know) by excessively using “hella”; and a T-shirt seen around Southern Californian campuses that read, “NorCal hella sucks!” Apparently this passage got removed because “two anecdotes don’t count as an established sociological fact” or some such. Well, see for yourself what’s up there now.

In short, the wasted effort and lingering frustration has left me a bit jaded.

;-)

(It’s true that a formal encyclopedia might invite foreign scholars’ contributions, but there’s likely to be some serious selection bias, as those invited will largely reflect the views of the inviters)

And the strength of Wiki is definetly in its breadth