Folks,

According to John Graham-Cumming, Wikipedia is a better resource for researchers than Britannica.

http://newstilt.com/notthatkindofdoctor/news/wikipedia-trumps-britannia

http://newstilt.com/notthatkindofdoctor/news/wikipedia-trumps-britanniaWhile writing The Geek Atlas I used both Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia for research. It quickly became obvious that Wikipedia trumps Britannica.

... While researching the history of places appearing in my book, The Geek Atlashttp://geekatlas.com/, I used a lot of different resources.

...

But the most useful resource was Wikipedia http://wikipedia.org/.

At the start of writing the book I bought myself a subscription toEncyclopedia Britannica http://www.britannica.com/ because I was worried that Wikipedia might be inaccurate.

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.

Initially, I’d find myself double-checking facts on Wikipedia by looking in Britannica. I’d read that Boltzmannhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Boltzmann died on September 5, 1906 on Wikipedia and jump to Britannica to check the datehttp://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/72401/Ludwig-Eduard-Boltzmann/72401main/Article#toc=toc9080519 .

After weeks of doing this I realized that Britannica wasn’t helping. Any errors I found on Wikipedia were because I was reading original source material (see for example this correctionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment&diff=248412125&oldid=248347239 ).

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.

Britannica, on the other hand, appears to view its role as being the reliable source. Because it is edited and managed, part of its brand is reliability. This leads to a sort of self-sufficiency which contrasts with Wikipedia’s need to prove its reliability constantly.

The beauty of being forced to prove reliability is the wealth of third-party links provided by Wikipedia. For example, when reading about the Miller-Urey Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment you’ll find a link to Miller’s 1953 paperhttp://www.issol.org/miller/miller1953.pdf describing the experiment.

If you search for “Miller Urey Experiment” on Britannica the best you’ll find is a short (248 words) article about Stanley Miller that mentions the experiment. There are no links to external web sites concerning the experiment, and no references to material such as academic papers.

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.

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.

The richness of Wikipedia trumped the hallowed reliability of Britannica.