[WikiEN-l] Re: Can you trust Wikipedia?

Sat Oct 29 04:39:05 UTC 2005

Puddl Duk wrote:

>Lets not delude ourselves. We have a long way to go.  I was just
>looking at some old EB articles the other day; Guerrilla [warfare],
>written by   ..........  T. E. Lawrence.  And Space-time, written by 
>..........  Albert Einstein.
>
>EB has literally tens of thousands of superb, first rate articles
>written by the world's leading experts and polished by an editorial
>staff. Yet we enjoy make fun of a handful of embarrassing errors or
>shortcomings that have.
>  
>
I'd say even the "good" Britannica articles are, with a very few 
exceptions, quite bad when it comes to having a neutral point of view.  
1911 EB in particular does not even pretend to be neutral, and makes 
quite unsupported judgments with astonishing frequency, claiming e.g. 
that a particular philosophical viewpoint is "wrong" (even if it's 
widely accepted), or that a particular author's work is "overrated", and 
so on.

The current edition is certainly much better than 1911, but it still 
leaves much to be desired.

-Mark