Free Republic

After 244 years, Encyclopaedia Britannica is shelving its venerable printed edition in favor of its Web-based version, completing a digital transition and marking the end of one of longest chapters in publishing history.

Years ago, I picked up a tattered but serviceable edition of the great Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Published in 1910, the twenty-eight-volume monument to human curiosity about the “arts, sciences, literature and general information” is a testament to scholarly industry. Compared to the mealy-mouthed reference works that clutter library shelves today, which typically compete to outdo one another in the exhibition of moral relativism, the Eleventh Edition (the common shorthand by which the work is known) is also a testament to a neglected virtue: robust cultural confidence. For a Westerner, it is refreshing to dip into its unembarrassed...

The Scribe’s Problem I found Robert McHenry’s recent piece (http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=121305E) on the superiority of Britannica over Wikipedia to be fascinating, for I think he’s allowed himself an error of logic that we more usually encounter in economics. It was also a little unkind of the publishing gremlins to schedule his piece the day before Nature came out with that research ( SEE: http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/online-encyclopedias-put-to-the-test/2005/12/14/1134500913345.html) into the relative accuracies of the two approaches. The, umm, research that showed roughly comparable levels of errors in the amateur thing thrown together on the web and the one expensively and carefully produced by multiple levels...

Wikipedia is about as good a source of accurate information as Britannica, the venerable standard-bearer of facts about the world around us, according to a study published this week in the journal Nature. Over the last couple of weeks, Wikipedia, the free, open-access encyclopedia, has taken a great deal of flak in the press for problems related to the credibility of its authors and its general accountability. In particular, Wikipedia has taken hits for its inclusion, for four months, of an anonymously written article linking former journalist John Seigenthaler to the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and John F. Kennedy. At...

Robert McHenry, Former Editor in Chief, the Encyclopædia Britannica, criticizes Wikipedia as a "faith-based encyclopedia". McHenry's basic argument is that, since anyone can post and edit Wikipedia entries, the content is inherently unreliable and tends toward mediocrity, rather than refinement. He points to an entry on Alexander Hamilton to demonstrate this: Hamilton's birth-year is ambiguous, yet the author doesn't mention this (although, the latest version seems to mention it). Worse yet, various dates in the entry are inconsistent with each other. Serious users, McHenry argues, need their answers to be correct. There are some problems with McHenry's argument. First of...