[WikiEN-l] Paying EB customer prefers Wikipedia

[Carl Beckhorn]

On Sat, Apr 19, 2008 at 04:37:13PM +0100, David Gerard wrote:
> Britannica and Brockhaus may be theoretically higher quality,

I had an interesting experience this week when I went to compare the 
EB online article on complex numbers with ours, to see what they chose 
to emphasize.  Young students are often exposed to complex numbers in 
school, and this is one of our 100 most viewed mathematics articles. 
So, I expected that there would be a thorough article on EB online. 

It turns out that (as far as I can tell) there is no article on EB 
online that includes even the formula for division of complex numbers 
in the form a+bi.  The entire EB online article for "complex number" is:

  "Number of the form x + yi, in which x and y are real numbers and i 
   is the imaginary unit such that i^2 = -1. See numerals and numeral 
   systems."

There is a little more information about complex numbers scattered 
throughout other articles (but, strangely, not the numerals and number 
systems article).

While our own article on complex numbers has some flaws, it's still a 
far better reference than EB online. 

 - Carl