5 ms·

I have a book called The Treasury of the Encyclopaedia Brittannica. It's probably the best demonstration of the difference between serious research and Wikipedi

I have a book called The Treasury of the Encyclopaedia Brittannica. It's probably the best demonstration of the difference between serious research and Wikipedia; here is a small sample of the articles (all excerpted from past editions of the Encyclopaedia): * Space-Time by Albert Einstein * Radium by Marie Curie * Mass Production by Henry Ford * Wireless Telephony by Guglielmo Marconi * Wilbur Wright by Orville Wright * Leon Trotsky by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin * Guerrila Warfare by T.E. Lawrence ('Lawrence of Arabia') * Yosemite Park by John Muir * Life, Terrestrial and Otherwise by Carl Sagan * The Philosophical Consequences of Relativity by Bertrand Russell There are many, many more. Do I want to learn from those people or from the 'wisdom' of the crowds? I think it's out of print, but I highly recommend it. (ISBN 0-670-83368-4)

tdaltonc 11y ago
This is what scholarpedia is for.
TheCoreh 11y ago
Isn't that essentially appeal to authority? As long as the information is factually correct it doesn't really matter where it came from.
- marcoperaza 11y ago
  Appeal to authority is totally valid when the authority is an expert in the subject matter. >As long as the information is factually correct it doesn't really matter where it came from. And who is the arbiter of factual correctness? Or conceptual correctness. I've noticed that lots of Wikipedia articles are completely inaccessible to people without lots of domain knowledge. I find that math articles in particular tend to obfuscate rather than elucidate.
  - adwf 11y ago
    Yes, a lot of the math/science articles are terribly written. Somewhere in a drawer I have a dusty old Physics degree, but even on subjects I understand very well, the Wikipedia article is frequently badly written and hard to comprehend.
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    I don't remember Britannica being any better. Britannica was purely a social signalling tool. The content was secondary. People bought it as evidence of middle class disposable income, not because they seriously expected to learn anything from it. My family couldn't afford Britannica, so I had to walk to a local library to read it. I remember it being fascinating from an "I didn't know that was even a thing" angle, but close to useless for learning about specific topics - mostly because the learning needed an entire book, not a short article. Wikipedia is great for factual gazeteer-type information about people and places, but it has the same problem with math and science - i.e. you literally can't teach the content in that format. I've sometimes wondered about a WikiTextBook site which has definitive and progressive tutorials/lessons on topics that don't fit the 'pedia format, starting from pre-school all the way up to post-grad. Online courses do this already, and some of them are very good at it. But it would be useful to have everything collected on a single site instead of scattered all over the web.
    - marcoperaza 11y ago
      >I've sometimes wondered about a WikiTextBook site which has definitive and progressive tutorials/lessons on topics that don't fit the 'pedia format, starting from pre-school all the way up to post-grad. There is a wikibooks, though I think it falls short of your ideal. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
    - hackuser 11y ago
      > Britannica was purely a social signalling tool. The content was secondary. People bought it as evidence of middle class disposable income, not because they seriously expected to learn anything from it. I'm not sure what basis you could have to say that. Have you seen a survey? Britannica was and I assume still is respected by academia as a serious, accurate reference tool.
    - tzs 11y ago
      > I've sometimes wondered about a WikiTextBook site which has definitive and progressive tutorials/lessons on topics that don't fit the 'pedia format, starting from pre-school all the way up to post-grad. I've wanted something similar, but going the other way. That is, you start at post-grad level and can expand things to lower level as needed. For instance, an article in this format on the prime number theorem would start out stating the theorem and presenting a proof at a level that you'd see if this was a proof from a mathematics journal. At any step in the proof you could expand the article in two ways. 1. Horizontal expansion. This fills in omitted steps, but stays at the same level. 2. Vertical expansion. This explains the step in terms of less advanced material. Expanded material could further be expanded, both horizontally and vertically. So for instance suppose that in the top level proof of the prime number theorem an integral appeared and was evaluated. Expanding horizontally would fill in the details of how you evaluate that integral. But suppose you have not studied calculus. You could expand that integral vertically, and keep expanding, until you get down to an explanation of calculus. That would give you essentially a course in calculus--but just the calculus needed to support the prime number theorem proof. This could be the basis of an alternative way to teach math and physics (and other sciences). Pick a set of interesting, advanced results, chosen so that when you expand all of them the bottom level will have covered the complete undergraduate math and physics curriculum. I think this could be a good approach because it provides more motivation. Everything you learn at the bottom level is motivated because it is needed for that specific advanced result you are trying to learn. Contrast that to the current approach where you have long stretches of material that might not seem interesting but that you are learning because you are told you'll need in 3 or 4 years when you are finally getting to look at interesting stuff.
  - vacri 11y ago
    > Appeal to authority is totally valid when the authority is an expert in the subject matter. John Muir lived in the 19th century. Yosemite Park has a bit more done to it and learned about it since then. Marconi straddled the 19th and 20th centuries, but claiming that his writings would inform you about wireless telephony as we currently know it is beyond foolish. They were experts in their time, but much has changed since then. > I find that math articles in particular tend to obfuscate rather than elucidate. Irony that you wouldn't use simpler English terms in this criticism :)
    - marcoperaza 11y ago
      >Irony that you wouldn't use simpler English terms in this criticism :) Haha, you got me there. I think you'd enjoy Orwell's essay, "Politics and the English Language". https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
      - vacri 11y ago
        Thank you, I'll check it out.
- pjc50 11y ago
  "Factually correct" is never the whole story. You can produce many radically different articles with no incorrect factual statements that lead the reader to different conclusions. WP tries to correct this with "neutral point of view", but that too is a mirage. History and politics in particular require interpretation in order to make sense of the material at all. Fundamentally compiling an encyclopedia is an act of summarising - declaring certain information to be more important, interesting or relevant - and it is impossible to eradicate subjectivity from that.
  - vacri 11y ago
    > it is impossible to eradicate subjectivity from that. One of the strangest criticisms I see about WP is that it's subjective about things like politics or biographies. These are subjective topics, and as such it's impossible to be wholly objective about them, even from the most well-intentioned, educated, neutral point of view. It's a strange criticism, because usually the critic will have no problems in ignoring the subjectivity of their suggested alternative, or sometimes conveniently neglect to provide an alternative at all.
  - pixl97 11y ago
    Omission of information while still providing facts can lead the reader to incorrect outcomes also. Take this example. Bob hit John in the face. Based on that information alone it seems like an unprovoked attack in which Bob is an aggressive attacker. Yet the statement is still factual. Bob hit John in the face because he was choking Mary to death. In this statement we see Bob as the defender and not the aggressor. With more information we could see why the situation unfolded in the first place, but many times it won't be available and things get left to interpretation. To agree with what you are saying above, large parts of human life are subjective, not because reality is subjective, but because information loss leaves us to interpret events via our biases.
danielconde 11y ago
I didn't know about this book, and thank you. I think reading the style and opinion of key contributors to industry, science, nature preservation and other areas also helps me understand their motivations and world views. It's not just a listing of facts, but trying to get into their mind-set. I feel I do not get that from wikipedia.
jgalt212 11y ago
This is interesting. On a related note, how come I've never seen britannica.com in my Google search results? Their robots.txt file doesn't scream crawlers go away. http://www.britannica.com/robots.txt http://www.britannica.com/robots.txt
- dazc 11y ago
  Interesting point. Their first article is about 100th Anniversary of the Battle of Verdun so I search "Battle of Verdun" and their page, in the UK, is #15. Looking at site overall I think this is a fair result? Maybe demonstrates that results on page 2 are generally overlooked/rarely seen?
  - dpc59 11y ago
    I wonder what would happen if google added 50% more results per page.
highwind 11y ago
Why not both? Learn from highly specialized experts. But since even the experts are not free from their personal biases, supplement the knowledge with 'wisdom' of the crowd.
- hackuser 11y ago
  > Why not both? Unless it's about something I already know, I can't always tell when a Wikipedia article is totally off base, either through omission or commission, about facts or context. I trust Britannica and experts more. IMHO, often the difference between experts and amateurs is that the amateurs have huge blind spots, gaps in their knowledge that they are unaware of, and a lack of context. A doctor and a patient can read the same online research but there's a big difference in how they might interpret it.
dredmorbius 11y ago
I'm ... not so certain I'd expect to see a balanced or even accurate view (in cases), of Trotsky by Lenin, of Yosemite by Muir, of Wilbur Wright by his brother, etc. I'm not saying that "balance" always achieves improved results -- see the Baathist Guard of Kochinistas standing jealous watch over any article concerning the Koch brothers, Koch Industries, or the various political influencing organisations. But what Wikipedia has that Brittanica did not is a "show history" page revealing who's made what changes to a page. That is often far more revealing than the page itself. Now: if Wikipedia would grow a pair of balls/ovaries and actually do something about rampantly partisan editors, that'd be peachy.
- hackuser 11y ago
  > I'm ... not so certain I'd expect to see a balanced or even accurate view (in cases), of Trotsky by Lenin, of Yosemite by Muir, of Wilbur Wright by his brother That's a good point about those examples; they are flawed in that respect. My point was that I'd rather read an article written by an expert and held to high editorial standards than one written by a crowd of people with various levels of knowledge. I'd also expect to learn much more uniquely valuable insight about an issue from the authors listed above, but that's a different issue. A philosphical question I heard on Car Talk: Do two people who don't know what they're talking about know more or less than one person who doesn't know what their talking about?
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    I'm a strong believer in expertise, and there's an argument to both modes (Britannica and Wikipedia). The latter seems to have won the past decade. Recruiting and vetting experts, and not falling into the trap of mindlessly accepting received wisdom, is tricky. So is false equivalence / false balance, and wisdom-of-crowds stuff. Though ... some of the wisdom-of-crowds bits suggest that if you can harness the sensibilities of the many, you may end up with better results than of a single individual. I'm not entirely sold. Area of active investigation.
vacri 11y ago
>Do I want to learn from those people or from the 'wisdom' of the crowds? ... I think it's out of print, but I highly recommend it "snide comment that my thing is better than your thing, then comment that my thing is not achievable" By the way, you're going to learn a shitload more about wireless telephony from modern sources than you are from Marconi. Likewise a few others in that list. And being a famous name doesn't mean that your writings are digestible to those not already in your industry. My mother sold encyclopaedia door-to-door briefly when I was a kid, and I read our set voraciously, every volume cover-to-cover. I really don't understand this dick-swinging competition where one encyclopaedia is considered to be some sort of godhead, and the next is considered to be a cesspit. I mean hell, Wikipedia has already won the 'source of truth' argument against Britannica, with independent studies showing that the former had a lower error rate than the latter. That doesn't mean that Britannica is useless, but it does point out that a lot of misconceptions about Wikipedia are unfounded.
- DonHopkins 11y ago
  Remember that annoying guy who thought Encyclopedia Britannica was his Key to the Information Age? [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMpgcz6s-eI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMpgcz6s-eI
icebraining 11y ago
If I want general knowledge, I prefer Wikipedia. If I need to delve into a specific topic, I'd rather read a book or three (by people like those, and others). Having a collection of great articles on a dozen random topics is not really helpful, since the probability that I'll want to learn about those specific topics is low. This is the Internet age. I'm not interested in having a poor man's library taking space on my shelf, when I can access the world's.
iso-8859-1 11y ago
Your ISBN is wrong. It should be 0670835684. Available in Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/treasuryofencyc00fadi_vmk https://archive.org/details/treasuryofencyc00fadi_vmk
- hackuser 11y ago
  > Your ISBN is wrong. It should be 0670835684. You are correct! And I even double-checked. I wish I could still edit my original comment. > Available in Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/treasuryofencyc00fadi_vmk https://archive.org/details/treasuryofencyc00fadi_vmk Wow, that's great! How does it work? Can I just get a logon and read any book there online? Download a PDF or ebook?
  - greglindahl 11y ago
    This book is part of the Internet Archive's "lending library" -- we own a physical copy, which sits in a shipping container, and we loan one electronic copy. We have an in-browser bookreader that you can use to read it. Sorry, no downloads of lending library books.
tim333 11y ago
>the difference between serious research and Wikipedia I think for much serious research you could start with Wikipedia and then read the linked sources. Wikipedia itself is only an informal summary. (I just read their summary of TE Lawrance's article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_and_tactics_of_guerrilla_warfare#Writings_of_T._E._Lawrence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_and_tactics_of_guerri... . Shame the original is paywalled)
- hackuser 11y ago
  > I just read their summary of TE Lawrance's article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_and_tactics_of_guerri.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_and_tactics_of_guerri.... . Shame the original is paywalled Wow, I'm amazed to see it cited. I assumed it was a long-forgotten treasure (and it is a treasure; it revolutionized my understanding of irregular and asymmetric warfare, plus he writes exceptionally well). To be clear, I don't know that the original is available anywhere online, paywalled or not. I think britannica.com (which has enough free articles that I rarely worry about the paywall) only has current articles, but I could be wrong. EDIT: It is online, apparently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11147725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11147725
  - tim333 11y ago
    Googling takes me to "Guerrilla warfare Written by: T.E. Lawrence" on Britannica's site, followed by "To continue reading activate your free trail"

tdaltonc 11y ago

This is what scholarpedia is for.

TheCoreh 11y ago

Isn't that essentially appeal to authority? As long as the information is factually correct it doesn't really matter where it came from.

marcoperaza 11y ago
Appeal to authority is totally valid when the authority is an expert in the subject matter. >As long as the information is factually correct it doesn't really matter where it came from. And who is the arbiter of factual correctness? Or conceptual correctness. I've noticed that lots of Wikipedia articles are completely inaccessible to people without lots of domain knowledge. I find that math articles in particular tend to obfuscate rather than elucidate.
- adwf 11y ago
  Yes, a lot of the math/science articles are terribly written. Somewhere in a drawer I have a dusty old Physics degree, but even on subjects I understand very well, the Wikipedia article is frequently badly written and hard to comprehend.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  I don't remember Britannica being any better. Britannica was purely a social signalling tool. The content was secondary. People bought it as evidence of middle class disposable income, not because they seriously expected to learn anything from it. My family couldn't afford Britannica, so I had to walk to a local library to read it. I remember it being fascinating from an "I didn't know that was even a thing" angle, but close to useless for learning about specific topics - mostly because the learning needed an entire book, not a short article. Wikipedia is great for factual gazeteer-type information about people and places, but it has the same problem with math and science - i.e. you literally can't teach the content in that format. I've sometimes wondered about a WikiTextBook site which has definitive and progressive tutorials/lessons on topics that don't fit the 'pedia format, starting from pre-school all the way up to post-grad. Online courses do this already, and some of them are very good at it. But it would be useful to have everything collected on a single site instead of scattered all over the web.
  - marcoperaza 11y ago
    >I've sometimes wondered about a WikiTextBook site which has definitive and progressive tutorials/lessons on topics that don't fit the 'pedia format, starting from pre-school all the way up to post-grad. There is a wikibooks, though I think it falls short of your ideal. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
  - hackuser 11y ago
    > Britannica was purely a social signalling tool. The content was secondary. People bought it as evidence of middle class disposable income, not because they seriously expected to learn anything from it. I'm not sure what basis you could have to say that. Have you seen a survey? Britannica was and I assume still is respected by academia as a serious, accurate reference tool.
  - tzs 11y ago
    > I've sometimes wondered about a WikiTextBook site which has definitive and progressive tutorials/lessons on topics that don't fit the 'pedia format, starting from pre-school all the way up to post-grad. I've wanted something similar, but going the other way. That is, you start at post-grad level and can expand things to lower level as needed. For instance, an article in this format on the prime number theorem would start out stating the theorem and presenting a proof at a level that you'd see if this was a proof from a mathematics journal. At any step in the proof you could expand the article in two ways. 1. Horizontal expansion. This fills in omitted steps, but stays at the same level. 2. Vertical expansion. This explains the step in terms of less advanced material. Expanded material could further be expanded, both horizontally and vertically. So for instance suppose that in the top level proof of the prime number theorem an integral appeared and was evaluated. Expanding horizontally would fill in the details of how you evaluate that integral. But suppose you have not studied calculus. You could expand that integral vertically, and keep expanding, until you get down to an explanation of calculus. That would give you essentially a course in calculus--but just the calculus needed to support the prime number theorem proof. This could be the basis of an alternative way to teach math and physics (and other sciences). Pick a set of interesting, advanced results, chosen so that when you expand all of them the bottom level will have covered the complete undergraduate math and physics curriculum. I think this could be a good approach because it provides more motivation. Everything you learn at the bottom level is motivated because it is needed for that specific advanced result you are trying to learn. Contrast that to the current approach where you have long stretches of material that might not seem interesting but that you are learning because you are told you'll need in 3 or 4 years when you are finally getting to look at interesting stuff.
- vacri 11y ago
  > Appeal to authority is totally valid when the authority is an expert in the subject matter. John Muir lived in the 19th century. Yosemite Park has a bit more done to it and learned about it since then. Marconi straddled the 19th and 20th centuries, but claiming that his writings would inform you about wireless telephony as we currently know it is beyond foolish. They were experts in their time, but much has changed since then. > I find that math articles in particular tend to obfuscate rather than elucidate. Irony that you wouldn't use simpler English terms in this criticism :)
  - marcoperaza 11y ago
    >Irony that you wouldn't use simpler English terms in this criticism :) Haha, you got me there. I think you'd enjoy Orwell's essay, "Politics and the English Language". https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
    - vacri 11y ago
      Thank you, I'll check it out.
pjc50 11y ago
"Factually correct" is never the whole story. You can produce many radically different articles with no incorrect factual statements that lead the reader to different conclusions. WP tries to correct this with "neutral point of view", but that too is a mirage. History and politics in particular require interpretation in order to make sense of the material at all. Fundamentally compiling an encyclopedia is an act of summarising - declaring certain information to be more important, interesting or relevant - and it is impossible to eradicate subjectivity from that.
- vacri 11y ago
  > it is impossible to eradicate subjectivity from that. One of the strangest criticisms I see about WP is that it's subjective about things like politics or biographies. These are subjective topics, and as such it's impossible to be wholly objective about them, even from the most well-intentioned, educated, neutral point of view. It's a strange criticism, because usually the critic will have no problems in ignoring the subjectivity of their suggested alternative, or sometimes conveniently neglect to provide an alternative at all.
- pixl97 11y ago
  Omission of information while still providing facts can lead the reader to incorrect outcomes also. Take this example. Bob hit John in the face. Based on that information alone it seems like an unprovoked attack in which Bob is an aggressive attacker. Yet the statement is still factual. Bob hit John in the face because he was choking Mary to death. In this statement we see Bob as the defender and not the aggressor. With more information we could see why the situation unfolded in the first place, but many times it won't be available and things get left to interpretation. To agree with what you are saying above, large parts of human life are subjective, not because reality is subjective, but because information loss leaves us to interpret events via our biases.

danielconde 11y ago

I didn't know about this book, and thank you. I think reading the style and opinion of key contributors to industry, science, nature preservation and other areas also helps me understand their motivations and world views. It's not just a listing of facts, but trying to get into their mind-set. I feel I do not get that from wikipedia.

jgalt212 11y ago

This is interesting. On a related note, how come I've never seen britannica.com in my Google search results? Their robots.txt file doesn't scream crawlers go away. http://www.britannica.com/robots.txt http://www.britannica.com/robots.txt

dazc 11y ago
Interesting point. Their first article is about 100th Anniversary of the Battle of Verdun so I search "Battle of Verdun" and their page, in the UK, is #15. Looking at site overall I think this is a fair result? Maybe demonstrates that results on page 2 are generally overlooked/rarely seen?
- dpc59 11y ago
  I wonder what would happen if google added 50% more results per page.

highwind 11y ago

Why not both? Learn from highly specialized experts. But since even the experts are not free from their personal biases, supplement the knowledge with 'wisdom' of the crowd.

hackuser 11y ago
> Why not both? Unless it's about something I already know, I can't always tell when a Wikipedia article is totally off base, either through omission or commission, about facts or context. I trust Britannica and experts more. IMHO, often the difference between experts and amateurs is that the amateurs have huge blind spots, gaps in their knowledge that they are unaware of, and a lack of context. A doctor and a patient can read the same online research but there's a big difference in how they might interpret it.

dredmorbius 11y ago

I'm ... not so certain I'd expect to see a balanced or even accurate view (in cases), of Trotsky by Lenin, of Yosemite by Muir, of Wilbur Wright by his brother, etc. I'm not saying that "balance" always achieves improved results -- see the Baathist Guard of Kochinistas standing jealous watch over any article concerning the Koch brothers, Koch Industries, or the various political influencing organisations. But what Wikipedia has that Brittanica did not is a "show history" page revealing who's made what changes to a page. That is often far more revealing than the page itself. Now: if Wikipedia would grow a pair of balls/ovaries and actually do something about rampantly partisan editors, that'd be peachy.

hackuser 11y ago
> I'm ... not so certain I'd expect to see a balanced or even accurate view (in cases), of Trotsky by Lenin, of Yosemite by Muir, of Wilbur Wright by his brother That's a good point about those examples; they are flawed in that respect. My point was that I'd rather read an article written by an expert and held to high editorial standards than one written by a crowd of people with various levels of knowledge. I'd also expect to learn much more uniquely valuable insight about an issue from the authors listed above, but that's a different issue. A philosphical question I heard on Car Talk: Do two people who don't know what they're talking about know more or less than one person who doesn't know what their talking about?
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  I'm a strong believer in expertise, and there's an argument to both modes (Britannica and Wikipedia). The latter seems to have won the past decade. Recruiting and vetting experts, and not falling into the trap of mindlessly accepting received wisdom, is tricky. So is false equivalence / false balance, and wisdom-of-crowds stuff. Though ... some of the wisdom-of-crowds bits suggest that if you can harness the sensibilities of the many, you may end up with better results than of a single individual. I'm not entirely sold. Area of active investigation.

vacri 11y ago

>Do I want to learn from those people or from the 'wisdom' of the crowds? ... I think it's out of print, but I highly recommend it "snide comment that my thing is better than your thing, then comment that my thing is not achievable" By the way, you're going to learn a shitload more about wireless telephony from modern sources than you are from Marconi. Likewise a few others in that list. And being a famous name doesn't mean that your writings are digestible to those not already in your industry. My mother sold encyclopaedia door-to-door briefly when I was a kid, and I read our set voraciously, every volume cover-to-cover. I really don't understand this dick-swinging competition where one encyclopaedia is considered to be some sort of godhead, and the next is considered to be a cesspit. I mean hell, Wikipedia has already won the 'source of truth' argument against Britannica, with independent studies showing that the former had a lower error rate than the latter. That doesn't mean that Britannica is useless, but it does point out that a lot of misconceptions about Wikipedia are unfounded.

DonHopkins 11y ago
Remember that annoying guy who thought Encyclopedia Britannica was his Key to the Information Age? [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMpgcz6s-eI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMpgcz6s-eI

icebraining 11y ago

If I want general knowledge, I prefer Wikipedia. If I need to delve into a specific topic, I'd rather read a book or three (by people like those, and others). Having a collection of great articles on a dozen random topics is not really helpful, since the probability that I'll want to learn about those specific topics is low. This is the Internet age. I'm not interested in having a poor man's library taking space on my shelf, when I can access the world's.

iso-8859-1 11y ago

Your ISBN is wrong. It should be 0670835684. Available in Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/treasuryofencyc00fadi_vmk https://archive.org/details/treasuryofencyc00fadi_vmk

hackuser 11y ago
> Your ISBN is wrong. It should be 0670835684. You are correct! And I even double-checked. I wish I could still edit my original comment. > Available in Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/treasuryofencyc00fadi_vmk https://archive.org/details/treasuryofencyc00fadi_vmk Wow, that's great! How does it work? Can I just get a logon and read any book there online? Download a PDF or ebook?
- greglindahl 11y ago
  This book is part of the Internet Archive's "lending library" -- we own a physical copy, which sits in a shipping container, and we loan one electronic copy. We have an in-browser bookreader that you can use to read it. Sorry, no downloads of lending library books.

tim333 11y ago

>the difference between serious research and Wikipedia I think for much serious research you could start with Wikipedia and then read the linked sources. Wikipedia itself is only an informal summary. (I just read their summary of TE Lawrance's article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_and_tactics_of_guerrilla_warfare#Writings_of_T._E._Lawrence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_and_tactics_of_guerri... . Shame the original is paywalled)

hackuser 11y ago
> I just read their summary of TE Lawrance's article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_and_tactics_of_guerri.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_and_tactics_of_guerri.... . Shame the original is paywalled Wow, I'm amazed to see it cited. I assumed it was a long-forgotten treasure (and it is a treasure; it revolutionized my understanding of irregular and asymmetric warfare, plus he writes exceptionally well). To be clear, I don't know that the original is available anywhere online, paywalled or not. I think britannica.com (which has enough free articles that I rarely worry about the paywall) only has current articles, but I could be wrong. EDIT: It is online, apparently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11147725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11147725
- tim333 11y ago
  Googling takes me to "Guerrilla warfare Written by: T.E. Lawrence" on Britannica's site, followed by "To continue reading activate your free trail"