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.
NPOV as a policy is nearly unique to WP. 1911EB is unabashedly
about describing the world from the British and Western POV -
they wouldn't have dreamed of representing the then-burning South
African situation as the Boers or Xhosa saw it, or the Opium Wars
as they seemed to the Chinese.
We could probably do some interesting "marketing" of WP along
these lines - highlight some balanced articles on topics for
which the typical net or printed source only presents one of the
sides. Partisans won't like those articles of course, but
thoughtful people will find it mind-expanding to hear about more
viewpoints than they can find in an Encarta or EB (does Encarta
still describe Bill Gates as a "respectable businessman loved by
all right-thinking people"? :-) ).
Stan