Ray Saintonge wrote:
From that article:
''We're deciding what people are going to think," said Wendy Doniger, a professor in the University of Chicago's Divinity School and the only member to have also served on the previous board, which had its last meeting in 1995.
There's the difference! With our stress on NPOV we're encouraging people to think for themselves.
They just don't get it.
In Brittanica's defense (or maybe not, depending on your point of view), they have never seen themselves, as Wikipedia does, as simply reporting knowledge. They may be moving towards something like that more recently, but historically their goal has been to present opinions of world-renowned experts, which is why they often had their articles signed by said experts. Sometimes these even included an explanation of why other viewpoints were wrong or at least misguided.
This can be seen in a lot of EB1911 articles imported into Wikipedia, which have to have value judgments removed from them. EB has tended not to have a problem simply stating /ex cathedra/ things like "[X] is a terrible novel and not up to the quality we've come to expect from [Y]".
From a Wikipedia point of view this looks sloppy and non-neutral, but it does fit Brittanica's historical model of being The Source of trusted information, not "merely" an editor and reporter of information.
-Mark