Stan Shebs wrote:
> Another interesting exercise is to look at the 1911 encyclopedia
> articles. Hundreds of obscure personages of ancient Rome each
> have their own article, carefully documented and cited, but there
> is no article for Standard Oil; it is briefly described in
> Rockefeller's bio, and under Trusts, but there is no encyclopedic
> description of the company itself, and ditto for the many other
> companies of the time. Despite the evidence all around them that
> corporations had come to be a significant part of their world,
> it seems that the 1911EBers had the idea that corporations were
> somehow "unencyclopedic", and to us today it looks like an odd
> oversight in Britannica's coverage.
In their British Empire-centric view, the EB editors of 1911 looked
backward to empires of the past (especially Rome), and it's not
surprising that they didn't recognize the empires of the future that
would displace them. At the time, the concept of a commercial
corporation in most cases was still strongly tied to the individuals who
organized them, often as family firms, so it probably didn't seem
worthwhile to create another article that would simply duplicate
information already covered. Had they been using a wiki, they probably
would have created [[Standard Oil]] as a redirect to [[John D.
Rockefeller]].
--Michael Snow