Encyclopædia Britannica competing with Wikipedia?

[Lynx-lynx]

I just searched for info on the Dreyfus affair (France 1894) and thought there'd probably be a wiki link, and yes there was, but there was also an Encyclopædia Britannica link, so I chose that.

Encyclopædia Britannica is a free site and the article that I looked at didn't nominate an author, so I assume that it was written by the Britannica staff Editors.

I don't know how limited the site is for information but as Britannica's reputation goes it's certainly a site that I'll refer to again.

Anyone else used it?

(The book I've started to read is Robert Harris' An Officer and a Spy which uses the techniques of a novel to retell the true story of the Dreyfus affair, a political scandal and miscarriage of justice that in the 1890s came to obsess France and ultimately the entire world. Zola supported Dreyfus and wrote J'accuse which is what I was interested in following up.)

[HarryT]

Moved to "General Discussions". The EB website has been around for many, many years. EB is now purely an online resource; they stopped printing the encyclopaedia in 2010.

[rollei]

Encyclopedia Britannica, assuming it is written by staff writers, is certainly more reliable than Wikipedia. Wikipedia, however, should have a wider range of topics including those that are not normally found in a encyclopedia.

[meeera]

Originally Posted by rollei

Encyclopedia Britannica, assuming it is written by staff writers, is certainly more reliable than Wikipedia.

Welllll..... not quite "certainly". The accuracy at Wikipedia is surprisingly good.

http://news.cnet.com/Study-Wikipedia...3-5997332.html

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by meeera

Welllll..... not quite "certainly". The accuracy at Wikipedia is surprisingly good.

http://news.cnet.com/Study-Wikipedia...3-5997332.html

The main problem with Wikipedia as a research tool is the fact that it's not stable, and not attributable, so it's of limited value as a reference source. With Britannica you know who wrote it, and can quote it as a reference. You could look at Wikipedia one day, find some information, go back next week, and find that the same article says something completely different.

As a general source of information I agree, Wiki is great. I use it almost every day to look up one thing or another. But when I want to do academic research, I go to Britannica.

[Shades]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The main problem with Wikipedia as a research tool is the fact that it's not stable, and not attributable, so it's of limited value as a reference source. With Britannica you know who wrote it, and can quote it as a reference. You could look at Wikipedia one day, find some information, go back next week, and find that the same article says something completely different.

As a general source of information I agree, Wiki is great. I use it almost every day to look up one thing or another. But when I want to do academic research, I go to Britannica.

Wikipedia can be wrong sometimes, but moderators are usually quick to correct errors. Wikipedia gets a lot of flak for being inaccurate when in reality that's just false. Articles are looked after very fastidiously. This is why the above link says Wiki and Britannica have similar figures when it comes to inaccuracy.

Also, Wikipedia is updated constantly and will usually contain the latest information on a subject.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Shades

Wikipedia can be wrong sometimes, but moderators are usually quick to correct errors. Wikipedia gets a lot of flak for being inaccurate when in reality that's just false. Articles are looked after very fastidiously. This is why the above link says Wiki and Britannica have similar figures when it comes to inaccuracy.

Also, Wikipedia is updated constantly and will usually contain the latest information on a subject.

The problem for academic use is not accuracy, but attribution. In an academic reference you need to be able to say who said something. You generally can't do that with Wiki, because authors are not attributed.

I'm doing a part-time degree in Egyptology, and we are not permitted to use Wiki as a reference source.

[Apache]

Most University courses do not allow Wiki to be used as a source. And if you ask the professors you will get the same answer Harry gives.
Apache

[meeera]

Academic research uses primary sources, in my experience, not encyclopaedias. Unless by "academic" you meant "school and early university", in which case, definitely.

[Shades]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The problem for academic use is not accuracy, but attribution. In an academic reference you need to be able to say who said something. You generally can't do that with Wiki, because authors are not attributed.

I'm doing a part-time degree in Egyptology, and we are not permitted to use Wiki as a reference source.

But you can look up the source of the information down in the references section and use that for attribution.

Most of the time when I have asked teachers/professors, they claim it as inaccurate because anyone can edit the articles, not because of attribution.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by meeera

Academic research uses primary sources, in my experience, not encyclopaedias. Unless by "academic" you meant "school and early university", in which case, definitely.

This is of course true, but the encyclopaedia is an excellent way of getting an overview of the subject before you start drilling down into the primary sources. The EB's hierarchical classification of knowledge makes this much easier than using Wikipedia.

Originally Posted by Shades

Most of the time when I have asked teachers/professors, they claim it as inaccurate because anyone can edit the articles, not because of attribution.

Agreed, and the exceptions invariably said that encyclopedias were not acceptable sources because they were secondary source or only provided an overview.

Most of the arguments against Wikipedia are ill informed anyhow. For example: citations for web pages usually contain the date and time of retrieval. If you click on "view history", you can retrieve the content of the article as cited. Very few web sites actually allow you to do that.

[taustin]

Originally Posted by Shades

Wikipedia can be wrong sometimes, but moderators are usually quick to correct errors. Wikipedia gets a lot of flak for being inaccurate when in reality that's just false. Articles are looked after very fastidiously. This is why the above link says Wiki and Britannica have similar figures when it comes to inaccuracy.

Also, Wikipedia is updated constantly and will usually contain the latest information on a subject.

Wikipedia has some editorial policies that are not well understood. To boil it down, their - published - policy is that they are, in essence, a popularity contest for factoids, and actual fact is secondary. They don't say it quite that way, of course, but that's what it amounts to.

One policy says that primary sources are not allowed a references. The reasons are understandable, but there's a price for that particular "solution." It's a policy to address problems with edit wars on controversial subjects, that ignores the problems it causes.

Another policy gives more weight to sources that are more widely quoted. Again, it makes sense on the surface, but again, there's a price.

What you get is that on controversial topics, or topics on which recent research has refuted long held wisdom, Wikipedia can't be updated even though it is provably wrong.

Here

If someone writes a biography of you, and it gets quote a lot, but it has the wrong date of birth for you, neither you not your birth certificate is an acceptable source to correct it.

When confronted on this, Wikipedia's editors response is, basically, "yeah, that's how it works, because that's how we want it to work."

Wikipedia is an excellent source for stuff that's not controversial, and stuff that's not changing, but only if it's not critically important knowledge. It's an OK source for references to do further reearch, sometimes, but never rely on Wikipedia alone even for that.

[taustin]

Originally Posted by meeera

Academic research uses primary sources

Which are explicitly prohibited by Wikipedia policy.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by taustin

If someone writes a biography of you, and it gets quote a lot, but it has the wrong date of birth for you, neither you not your birth certificate is an acceptable source to correct it.

Which is a good thing since you need some evidence showing that the person is not lying about the birth date or that the birth certificate is not faked.