4 ms·

There's a lot of evidence that Wikipedia's articles are actually better than Britannica: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#Comparative_studi

• pekk 13y ago
  Who uses Britannica after grade school? Only idiots. But people still take Wikipedia seriously after grade school. That's what's insidious about it.
• jmyc 13y ago
  Britannica articles aren't written by "one person who spent their lifetime researching" that topic.
  • memracom 13y ago
    Actually, they often are. But Wikipedia articles are written by dozens or even hundreds of people who spent a significant part of their lives researching the topic. Individually none of those people can match that Britannica expert's experience, but collectively they dwarf him.
    • _delirium 13y ago
      Britannica's expert model also risks some pretty biased and incomplete articles, depending on the expert chosen. There's a relationship between being prominent in a field and being willing and able to write a comprehensive, neutral overview of the field, but it's not quite the same thing, and some top researchers are very bad at the latter.
• GoodIntentions 13y ago
  The difference being in my mind that I won't turn to an article in Britannica and find it randomly defaced, or deliberately seeded with biased information. Wikipedia is awesome, but gotta use it as a jumping off point to find references to "real" sources for anything that _must_ be right.