zlacker

When I was a kid you could subscribe to an encyclopedia. They were too expensive to be bought in one go and they were too expensive to make in one go. The solution was to sell them in installments and mail you the monthly addition that you could add. Obviously the marketing ploy was that if you were halfway through the 'A' that you would buy the rest of the A and once you had the 'A' then you'd buy the rest of the book.

Regardless, the business was there. Wikipedia killed all that. So if you want to create an expertly created encyclopedia anno 2025 you have a real problem: you will need to pay experts for their time somehow otherwise why would they compete with the million monkeys, but your source of revenue has been strangled by those very same monkeys, who it turns out produce content that is orders of magnitude better than anything I've ever read in a for-pay encyclopedia from before Wikipedia.

The bar to entry is insanely high.