> 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 _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
