It has been several years now that the quality and depth of the free material at Wikipedia surpassed that of the paying Microsoft Encarta and Encyclopedia Britannica.
Microsoft has just decided to drop the Encarta product as unprofitable.
Encarta was ground-breaking in that it summarized knowledge to CD-ROM for easy and affordable lookup in the early years of the PC. It was equally known for the commercial angle of it's content, for example, offering different views of the same events for different markets.
Britannica was ground-breaking in the sense of summarizing general knowledge into book form at the end of the 1700s.
Wikipedia is ground breaking in two aspects: 1) It allows anyone to edit or create articles (with certain limits) as opposed to drawing on 'experts' and 2) it is freely searchable via the Internet, not imposing a rigid set of dimensions to searches.
Wikipedia represents a democratization of access to the creation and consumption of knowledge in line with Dwapara Yuga's spirit.
A similar move is occurring in the world of higher education. From 1969, in Britain, university education was opened to everyone no matter their academic background or location with the Open University.
In that most commercial of American Educational Products, the MBA, the idea of being location independent is being taken up to compliment the on site programs with Internet Versions from major institutions such as the Cornell and Thunderbird Schools of Management.
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