David Gerard wrote:
2008/6/3 Thomas Dalton
<thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>om>:
Presumably they don't claim to be neutral -
if they do, they are
simply delusional. That paragraph was critical appraisal, it wasn't
neutral reporting, at least not in the sense we mean.
EB 1911 never claimed or attempted neutral point of view - it's a
Wikipedia innovation as a stated principle. (I think it's our most
important innovation, much more important than merely letting anyone
edit the website.)
We might have innovated it as a stated principle (though I couldn't say
that for sure without researching more), but it's been the general trend
for decades now---even between EB1911 and a recent edition of Britannica
there's a substantial decrease in how opinionated the articles are. So
it's a bit unfair to cite 100-year-old Britannica prose as an example of
why their encyclopedia isn't good in some way, when there's a good
chance it's been updated (not everything has, but a lot has). Actually,
reference works in general have been making a slow shift from
prescriptive to descriptive treatments.
-Mark