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 policyhttp://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