What I discovered was that Wikipedia trumps Britanncia
all the time because
its articles are in more depth and provide better references. And the site
design means that Wikipedia is easily navigable and focuses on the content,
whereas Britannica’s site assaults the eyes with distractions.
Not to mention that Wikipedia is fully free.
And more often than not I was finding original source
material via
Wikipedia. Because Wikipedia has a
policy<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability> of
linking to reliable sources it turned out to be a wonderful starting point
for research.
After a few weeks I canceled my Britannica
subscription and worked solely
with Wikipedia as a starting point for research. I never relied on Wikipedia
as the sole source of information, but it was always a marvelous spring
board to get me started.
Well, that's exactly where Wikipedia today fits into the research
dimension. It's a starting point; a springboard to further research
material.
So Wikipedia’s supposed ‘unreliability’ actually plays
to enhance its
reliability and usefulness because it’s forced to continuously declare where
a particular fact was found. At the same time Britannica is a walled garden
of truth.
That walled garden seems in many cases to actually be less reliable
than Wikipedia. A proper study into the reliability of Britanica
relative to Wikipedia hasn't been done in a while, though:
http://bit.ly/a2WSI2.
Anthony