[WikiEN-l] Britannica attempts to become Wikipedia

[Delirium]

David Gerard wrote:
> 2008/6/3 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>:
>   
>> Presumably they don't claim to be neutral - if they do, they are
>> simply delusional. That paragraph was critical appraisal, it wasn't
>> neutral reporting, at least not in the sense we mean.
>>     
>
>
> EB 1911 never claimed or attempted neutral point of view - it's a
> Wikipedia innovation as a stated principle. (I think it's our most
> important innovation, much more important than merely letting anyone
> edit the website.)
>   
We might have innovated it as a stated principle (though I couldn't say 
that for sure without researching more), but it's been the general trend 
for decades now---even between EB1911 and a recent edition of Britannica 
there's a substantial decrease in how opinionated the articles are. So 
it's a bit unfair to cite 100-year-old Britannica prose as an example of 
why their encyclopedia isn't good in some way, when there's a good 
chance it's been updated (not everything has, but a lot has). Actually, 
reference works in general have been making a slow shift from 
prescriptive to descriptive treatments.

-Mark