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Back in the day, it was a great product. My family had an edition endorsed (in the first pages) by Queen Elizabeth II and Richard Nixon, and I can't calculate
by mynameishere 15y ago
Back in the day, it was a great product. My family had an edition endorsed (in the first pages) by Queen Elizabeth II and Richard Nixon, and I can't calculate how many hours I spent leafing through the pages. I guess that's been replaced by Wikipedia's "Random article" link, but with EB you never got crap about Pokemon.
- hengli 15y agohttp://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1493458/Pokemon http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1493458/Pokemon
- ghshephard 15y agoInteresting how lacking that article is compared to it's Wikipedia Brethren.
- waterlesscloud 15y agoThere was huge value in thumbing through these as a child. We could never afford the set, but I had used copies of individual volumes and I spent many, many hours reading random topics. You just don't get that kind of discovery in an online version. Maybe you could, but you don't.
- saryant 15y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
- kijin 15y agoHalf the time, that leads to auto-generated stub articles about small towns in the middle of nowhere.
- aValidUserName 15y agoSo just hit it again until it leads to something interesting.
- bartread 15y agoSeriously? YOU don't? You've obviously never experienced the Wikipedia death spiral: 30 browser tabs open all on unrelated Wikipedia pages. It was dangerously close to an addiction for me at one point and the amount of random crap I now know it irritates me I'm still so poor at pub quizes. There's probably some Godwin's Law equivalent where once you've opened a tab relating to Hitler or the Nazis, having started off on an article about Bengal Tigers, you know it's time for bed.
- waterlesscloud 15y agoThe problem is that you're selecting the topics. The value of a physical encyclopedia is that they've selected the topics and you're browsing them at random.
- colomon 15y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Random http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Random
- jamroom 15y agoI agree - I have a lot of nostalgia over this, as we had a complete set of the 1921 edition - reading though that to see just how much the world had changed (and this would have been in the 80's) was fascinating.
- joejohnson 15y agoSomeone should implement a "Random Article" link that would select only from a Encyclopedia Britannica-esque subset of Wikipedia.
- InnocentB 15y agohttp://toolserver.org/~erwin85/randomarticle.php?lang=en&family=wikipedia&categories=Good+articles http://toolserver.org/~erwin85/randomarticle.php?lang=en&... selects randomly from their list of Good articles, which is the nearest thing I'm aware of, though still not quite what you're describing.