[burntoutfire]

> Are there any superior alternatives at scale?

Pay tens of thousands of experts to work on the encyclopedia instead. The issue isn't scale, but the cost of the labor (which, in Wikipedia's case, is free - but in many cases you get the quality you paid for).

[hirako2000]

This alternative has shown to produce inferior universal encyclopedia.

Encyclopedia Britanica was/is probably the most successful professional collection of knowledge, it's been superseded by Wikipedia over a decade ago.

Free contributor is a low expense for sure but what you get isn't necessarily lower value than paying contributors.

[HeadsUpHigh]

The problem with wikipedia is that the existing editors tend to drive away experts who are willing to edit things for free though. Like one comment here about the random editor with a beginner's textbook reverting edits with information that was not in their textbook( that were properly cited from well-known books). That's just ridiculous and I'm blown away at the level of hubris that makes you trust your own lack of knowledge more than proper citations.

[burntoutfire]

Were the expert-produced entries in Britannica of lower quality/accuracy than in Wikipedia?