There have been no shortage of insane overambitious ideas on the Internet. Most of them ne
ver make it further than the pub they are conceived in. Some generate hype but quickly fall flat on their face. Others survive but prove to be minnows rather than the giants they set out to be. However, every so often one sneaks through. Wikipedia is one of the rare ones that made it. Even by the admission of its founder, the 38-year-old technology entrepreneur Jimmy Wales, it was a "completely insane idea", a free online encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to and anyone can edit. There is no editor, no army of proofreaders and fact checkers, in fact, no full-time staff at all. It is, in other words, about as far from the traditional idea of an encyclopedia as you can get.
There are dozens of reasons why it shouldn't work, and it is still far from perfect; but in less than four years it has grown to have more than 1 million entries written in 100 languages from Albanian to Zulu. To its fans, it is a fantastic research resource--albeit one that you should use with caution and an incredible example of what can be achieved by collaboration and cooperation over the Internet. To its critics--mostly those from the traditional world of encyclopedias and librarianship, it is barely worthy of the label "encyclopedia".
Wikipedia has so far been bankrolled by Wales, but the total cost so far is still around￡300,000. The current Encyclopedia Britannica has 44m words of text. Wikipedia already has more than 250m words in it. Britannica's most recent edition has 65,000 entries in print and 75,000 entries online. Wikipedia's English site has some 360,000 entries and is growing every day.
But numbers mean nothing if the quality is no good. And this is where the arguments start. "Theoretically, it's a lovely idea," says librarian and Internet consultant Philip Bradley, "but practically, I wouldn't use it and I'm not aware of a single librarian who would. The main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers have to ensure that their data is reliable as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window." Wales responds by acknowledging that Wikipedia's model leaves it anything but error free, something they make clear on the site, but he also points to an article in a German technology magazine this month, which compares Wikipedia with two established traditional digital encyclopedias, Brockhaus and Microsofi's Encarta. All three were tested on breadth, depth and comprehensibility of content, ease of searching, and quality of multimedia content. Wikipedia won hands down.
Wikipedia is different from the traditional encyclopedias in that ______.
A．it started with an insane idea
B．it has no full-time staff at all
C．it is a resource that one must use with caution
D．it has the largest number of entries
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