Professional paper
From »Who« and »What« to »How« and »Why« − The Future of on-line Encyclopaedias
Nenad Prelog
; Department of Tourism and Communication Studies, University of Zadar
Abstract
This work discusses the changes in the structure of knowledge, the increasing demand for the ability to find and retrieve, grade and value, organize and creatively use relevant information. Users today obtain content using browsers, which requires a different approach to organizing encyclopaedias and other lexicographic publications. One can find everything, but it is important to know where and how to search for it. Not even Google can answer all the questions. If we take those 5W journalistic questions (who, what, where, when, why) as a criterion of quality, we can easily deduce that the answers to the questions asked by the first four interrogative pronouns are almost always available, even appropriate, accurate and sufficient; while things tend to get complicated when we ask the question why. Our research centred on the quality of “coverage” of some familiar lexical units in Croatia, in four different Wikipedias: four regional languages, or “editions” (Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Serbo-Croatian), and four world languages (English, French, German and Spanish). We looked at the representation of authors and athletes in those languages. No one of the searched authors has an article in all the languages/editions. Looking at the languages, it is clear that our authors almost do not exist in the Spanish and French editions, and the situation is only slightly better in the German edition. The representation of athletes is far better; almost all of them appeared in the selected world languages. Several questions arose in the end, e.g. whether it is more important to write “for oneself”, i.e. work on creating a high-quality encyclopaedia intended for a Croatian audience and all of those who speak Croatian, or should one work systematically on presenting “our” themes, regardless whether they deal with politics, history or (in the broadest sense) culture and art, in foreign editions. If we can agree that we will get relatively successful answers to the questions who, what, where and when, and significantly less succes sful answers to the question how or why, then that answers the question of the role of on-line encyclopaedias in the transfer of knowledge. The value of knowledge contained in the answer to a how or why question is the “added value” of the encyclopaedia, that which separates it from a dictionary or a browser.
Keywords
Google; 5W; Wikipedia; online encyclopaedia
Hrčak ID:
110396
URI
Publication date:
12.12.2012.
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