IF YOU still have any old Britannicas clogging your bookshelves, it is time finally to haul them off to Oxfam. Wikipedia, the world’s fastest-growing English-language encyclopedia, has just published its 300,000th lucid entry, eclipsing Britannica by a factor of three. It is a scholarly, thorough work of reference that costs nothing to consult apart from an internet connection. Best of all, entries are endlessly updated to keep them relevant, errors are gladly corrected within minutes, and — unlike its stuffier predecessors — it respects the specialist knowledge of you, its user.

Wikipedia comes from the Hawaiian word for “quick”. In barely three years, thousands of volunteers have contributed copyright-free articles at wikipedia.org in 83 languages, from Afrikaans to Yiddish. Anyone can improve definitions by clicking “Edit this page” tabs above entries, and every day a further 2,000 terms are defined. It might sound a recipe for chaos, inviting corruption by personal prejudice or commercial interest; but somehow a collective sense of civility has prevailed to create a genuinely useful and entertaining resource.

In the entry for The Times, for instance, you can read a cogent history from 1785 to the compact’s launch, with a commendably neutral commentary and brief biographies of editors past and present. Nor are your inquiries interrupted by intrusive advertisements: the site is funded by donations and contributors’ goodwill.

Recent additions include Wiktionary, a collaborative dictionary and thesaurus (wiktionary.org), Wikibooks, an open collection of electronic books (wikibooks.org) and Wikitravel (wikitravel.org), an up-to-date and honest guide to 2,014 destinations (oops, it’s grown to 2,015 since I started this paragraph). You might expect such open-source knowledge repositories to lack the hardbacks’ authority, but entries face the scrutiny of thousands of other users. That makes them “highly reliable but not perfect”, admits Jimmy Wales, the Florida-based entrepreneur who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001.

Still, its expensive paper predecessors were not perfect either. Wikipedia’s entry for “Britannica” includes 26 categories of the work’s “mistakes and omissions” — which its online successor has corrected.

• If you have tried to use Odeon Cinemas’ website you will have noticed how badly designed it is: clumsily built around Java-script, it makes browsers crash and is so inaccessible that it may contravene the Disability Discrimination Act. Matthew Somerville, a 23-year-old Oxford graduate, decided to help by writing code to make the film listings easily searchable. As with his previous projects, offering “accessible” versions of the National Rail, Hutton inquiry and Directory Enquiries websites, he built a simple-to-use interface on his own website, dracos.co.uk. It became so popular, with 250,000 hits last month, that it even overtook the Odeon site on some Google searches.

  Odeon is unhappy, even though Somerville does not benefit from the service. Its marketing director, Luke Vetere, wrote to him threatening legal action after “an increasing number of complaints from customers”, and last weekend Somerville was forced to pull the search facility. By coincidence, National Rail has also contacted Somerville to say that his website is welcome to provide its simplified train-timetable search until the official site is relaunched this October.

  Now, which seems to you the more enlightened online business?
  
  DAVID ROWAN