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Suw Charman-Anderson

Suw Charman-Anderson is a social software consultant and writer who specialises in the use of blogs and wikis behind the firewall. With a background in journalism, publishing and web design, Suw is now one of the UK's best known bloggers, frequently speaking at conferences and seminars.

She recently launched Kits and Mortar, a blog about planning a green, cat-friendly self-built home.

Suw is also founder and board member of the Open Rights Group, a digital rights advocacy group which aims to raise awareness of digital rights issues, to campaign against bad legislation in Britain and the EU, and to support grass roots activism.

Her personal blog is Chocolate and Vodka, and yes, she's married to Kevin.

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Kevin Anderson

Kevin Anderson has been an online journalist since 1996, designing, editing and writing websites for both broadcast and print media. In 1998, he joined the BBC and became their first online journalist based outside of the UK, covering the US for its award winning news website. After coming to the UK in 2005, he developed a blogging strategy for BBC news, helped launch a programme on the BBC's 5Live covering weblogs and podcasts and was on the team that launched the interactive radio programme World Have Your Say on the BBC World Service.

Kevin is now the Blogs Editor for The Guardian, where he is responsible for management, strategy and 'leading by doing' for Guardian Unlimited blogs.

E-mail Kevin.

Member of the Media 2.0 Workgroup
Dark Blogs Case Study
Case Study 01 - A European Pharmaceutical Group
Find out how a large pharma company uses dark blogs (behind the firewall) to gather and disseminate competitive intelligence material.
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Don't Miss The DrugSafetyHub, a new blog on counterfeit drugs and the evolution of the pharma industry

Strange Attractor

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September 13, 2006

Wikipedia vs Britannica: Yawn

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Posted by Suw Charman

So Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia and Dale Hoiberg from Britannica slug it out in the Wall Street Journal. Both miss the point.

Wikipedia will remain the canonical reference source for the internet for as long as Britannica remains a paid-for service. When Britannica makes its content freely accessible to the public, and is one of the sites that can be directly searched from your browser, the way that Wikipedia is from Firefox, then we may see a shift. But until then, we the public cannot compare and contrast the content of the two services, and we cannot make up our own minds as to whether we prefer Wikipedia over Britannica or not.

So all this debate over open and closed models is no more than blowing hot air. Wikipedia wins not because it is more accurate or more inclusive or written by more people or has expert contributors. All that is irrelevant. It wins because it's free.

(Link via Euan.)

Comments (3) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: Wikis in business


COMMENTS

1. David Phillips on September 13, 2006 4:26 PM writes...

Oh.. how true.

I also keep running into publication that hide content behind subscriptions. Google News is just so convenient to find the free stuff.

If links are assets (yes they are) Britannica can never catch up without re-inventing itself.

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2. Steve on September 13, 2006 6:34 PM writes...

I almost laughed out loud when Dale Hoiberg got miffed that Jimmy Wales used text links in his repsonses. That is what makes the Internet so great; one can easily point a web surfer to a source of information.

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3. Kevin Marks on September 13, 2006 6:47 PM writes...

Britannica used to be free online - back when they were upselling the CD-ROM version. They withdrew it and made it for pay thereafter, creating a niche for wikipedia.
That said, even if it were free online (as it is in libraries, after all) there is still a place for the more comprehensive and consensual work that Wikipedia is growing into. The more insidious threat to Wikipedia is the deletionist clique that deters the contributors who write most of the substantive prose.
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowritescomments

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