  The Atlantic  Sure, Wikipedia represents a drastic departure
from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but if you compare it with
even earlier reference works, it doesn't look so unusual.  View
photo   The frontispiece from Ephraim Chambers' 1728 Cyclopaedia
(University of Wisconsin Digital Collections)  Wikipedia
certainly deserves many of the superlatives ascribed to it: It
is unquestionably the largest, deepest, and most accessible
encyclopedia ever written.  But a new paper argues that when it
comes to the method by which Wikipedia was assembled -- amateur,
obsessive collaborators augmenting earlier work bit by bit --
Wikipedia's not as revolutionary as it's cracked up to be.
"Wikipedia has been repeatedly compared with just one other
encyclopedia, the Encyclopaedia Britannica in its most recent
printed and electronic editions," Jeff Loveland and Joseph
Reagle write. But what if its the latter years of the EB -- and
not Wikipedia -- that's historically unusual?  Take your
standard Wikipedian, for example. A W