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Jacqueline Rousseau
ENG 3803 History of Text Technologies
Professor Jessica Pitts
23 April 2015
Wikipedia VS Britannica
In the current world of technology and the internet, information is quite literally at our
fingertips. We can look anything up from obscure diseases to South African political debates, but
not all the information we find is accurate. Hoaxes, extremists, and people just trying to make a
quick buck can upload troves of inaccurate information in order to sway opinions or to convince
people to buy products. How is it possible, then, to know that the facts youre looking for are
going to be correct?
The generation before us would have turned to the Britannica encyclopedia, statelylooking on library bookshelves in gold-embossed covers. Flipping through the pages makes a
person feel important; that the research theyre doing is legitimate and respected. This is because
of the encyclopedias reputation. Every year from 1768 to 2011, Brittanica printed its 32
volumes, weighing in at 127 pounds and costing an average of $1,395. Those are some pretty
intense figures, and it meant that the average person didnt have the access that they necessarily
wanted.
Various encyclopedias had been published since ancient times, beginning with Aristotles
works. English encyclopedias didnt appear until the 18th century, though, beginning with
Lexicon technicum, or A Universal English Dictionary of Arts and Sciences by John Harris,

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which had two volumes. The first edition of Britannica was published in 1771, and was the idea
of Colin Macfarquhar and Andrew Bell. It was produced in 100 parts, called numbers, and
these parts were later bound into three volumes with 2,391 pages. It was organized alphabetically
by A-B, C-L, and M-Z. The reason that Britannica stood out from the other various brands is
because related topics were grouped into longer essays, which were then organized
alphabetically. This made them easier to find and understand. Older encyclopedias were
structured much like a modern dictionary, with each listing being separate and alphabetical.
Britannica promises accuracy and relevance to its readers through experts. Top experts
are invited to contribute to the books every year, and this gives the texts a strong authority, even
when theyre a couple years out of date. By the 1960s, however, people were starting to distrust
some of its articles and profits fell. Physicist Harvey Einbinder pushed for the development of
the fifteenth edition, which took ten years to complete and was published in 1974. This edition
was also marked by the lack of an index, which infuriated readers. In 2010, Britannica decided to
stop printing paper versions and focus on the DVD and online versions of the encyclopedia.
A contributing factor to the fall of Britannica sales is the website Wikipedia. In 1999,
modern philosophers and computer-savvy nerds Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger collaborated
to make an online bank of knowledge. This was in response to the inability to search for
categories of informationinformation was accessible on the internet if you knew exactly what
you were searching for and how to search for it. There were no search databases until 1994,
when Yahoo was created. This was the first online database that lumped articles together
according to relevance, by what we now call tags, making surfing the web much more accessible.
Wales and Sanger wondered what would happen if they let the public categorize this information

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themselves. Wales told Sanger that he wanted to make an open encyclopedia. Open meant that
anyone in the general public could contribute and that anyone could access it.
The project quickly picked up speed. By the end of its first month in January,1991,
Wikipedia had seventeen entries with more than 200 words. By the end of February, it had 150;
March, 572; April, 835; May, 1,300; June, 1,700; July, 2,400; August, 3,700. At the end of the
year, the site boasted approximately 15,000 articles and about 350 devoted Wikipedians.
Wikipedia is unique in the sense that it has no administrators. The site is completely
policed by contributors, some of who volunteer tirelessly to clean up and edit articles. If a
contributor is concerned about an edit or a deletion, they can bring up the issue in the Wikipedia
Commons, which is a discussion board of sorts that allows users to debate, archive, and undo
changes made to the pages. Author Marshall Poe discovered that his page was being considered
for deletion until another contributor challenged it. When that Wikipedian provided enough
research to deem Poe relevant, the community decided that his article should remain.
This is a prime example of how Wikipedia helped changed the way we view knowledge.
We usually consider facts and truths to be almost God-given, that they exist simply because
the world put them there. This, however, may not be the case. As new research is funded and new
discoveries are made, things we previously viewed as truths and facts are questioned. Poe
makes an excellent statement of this in his article, The Hive, Just think about the way we learn
what words mean. Generally speaking, we do so by listening to other people (our parents, first).
Since we want to communicate with them (after all, they feed us), we use the words in the same
way they do. Wikipedia says judgments of truth and falsehood work the same way. The
community decides that two plus two equals four the same way it decides what an apple is: by
consensus. Yes, that means that if the community changes its mind and decides that two plus two

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equals five, then two plus two does equal five. The community isnt likely to do such an absurd
or useless thing, but it has the ability.
Because it is being updated in real-time, it is often thought as being more accurate than
the encyclopedia. New discoveries can be uploaded almost immediately as theyre published; all
it takes is for one Wikipedian to read a scientific journal and then edit the topics page. On the
other hand, people use this argument to say that Wikipedia isnt accurate at all. The internet is
full of people with bad and good intentions, and some people like to annoy the general public by
uploading ridiculous information. This happened to me when I searched The US Senate on
Wikipedia in high school, and discovered that its article had been reduced to: The United States
Senate does a lot of things, including your mom. It was corrected within minutes of my
discovery, however, which demonstrates that the self-policing system actually works. But there is
also the question of authoritywho are these anonymous contributors? They can range from an
average person to an expert in the field, and users have no way of knowing, even though each
article is cited thoroughly. Despite this, there is no way to make sure that the articles are accurate
unless the reader wants to do outside research as well.
The question of bias is also asked about both Wikipedia and Britannica. Forbes Magazine
interviewed Feng Zhu, an assistant professor in the Technology and Operations Management unit
at Harvard Business School, who details the rise and fall of Britannica in a new working paper.
There has been lots of research on the accuracy of Wikipedia, and the results are mixedsome
studies show it is just as good as the experts, others show [that] Wikipedia is not accurate at all.
Complicating matters, however, is that many of the topics that we look up in the Britannica
arent strictly facts. Most of the topics of content we are dealing with on a daily basis do not
have a verifiable answer, says Zhu. They can be quite subjective or even controversial. Over

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the years, Britannica has handled this by finding experts to provide a sober analysis on the
various subjects, while Wikipedia encourages contributors to write from a neutral point of view,
or to present both sides of an argument if that cant be achieved. However, Zhu found that, in
general, Wikipedia articles were found to be more biased than the Britannica, 71% to 34%, and
more left-leaning. Wikipedias bias also seems to be stemming from the fact that its articles have
a higher word count and include extremely current information. When you reduce the word count
to that of the articles in the Britannica, the bias is the same, 34%. The currently political climate
also contributes to the bias, which the Britannica doesnt always reflect as accuratelyor
inaccurately, depending on your viewpointas Wikipedia.

While the histories of Britannica and Wikipedia are both fascinating, and both are rooted
in the same cause, they go about their missions very differently. Britannica relies on a long
tradition of inviting experts to contribute their knowledge, while Wikipedia relies on the
knowledge of common people. Both have had their accuracy, bias, and relevance questioned, and
neither one seems to be better than the other. While you can still purchase subscriptions to the
online Britannica, Wikipedia remains free of charge and free of ads. Both information banks can
provide the reader with accurate information, and both are susceptible to bias through human
nature. Which one is inherently better, though? Thats for each person to decide for themselves.

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Works Cited
Poe, Marshall. "The Hive." The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 1 Sept. 2006. Web. 24 Apr.
2015. <http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/09/the-hive/305118/>.
Blanding, Michael. "Wikipedia Or Encyclopedia Britannica: Which Has More Bias?" Forbes.
Forbes Magazine, 20 Jan. 2015. Web. 24 Apr. 2015.
<http://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2015/01/20/wikipedia-orencyclopaedia-britannica-which-has-more-bias/2/>.
Catropa, Dayna. "Wikipedia vs Britannica." Strategy Blog. Inside Higher Ed, 18 Feb. 2013. Web.
24 Apr. 2015. <https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/stratedgy/wikipedia-vsbritannica>.
Silverman, Matt. "Encyclopedia Britannica vs. Wikipedia [INFOGRAPHIC]." Mashable.
Mashable, 16 Mar. 2012. Web. 24 Apr. 2015.
<http://mashable.com/2012/03/16/encyclopedia-britannica-wikipedia-infographic/>.
"Wikipedia vs Encyclopedia: A Question of Trust?" TechRadar. Future Plc, 21 Apr. 2008. Web.
24 Apr. 2015. <http://www.techradar.com/us/news/software/internet/web/wikipedia-vsencyclopaedia-a-question-of-trust-316163>.
Ionescu, Daniel. "Has Wikipedia Beaten Britannica in the Encyclopedia Battle?" PC World. PC
World, 14 Mar. 2012. Web. 24 Apr. 2015.
<http://www.pcworld.com/article/251796/has_wikipedia_beat_britannica_in_the_encyclo
pedia_battle_.html>.

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