Britannica is a well-established general English-language encycopaedia and draws from a community. There is no doubt that the quality and accuracy of the knowledge in Britannica are high and precise enough because there are more than a hundred Nobel Prize winners and more than 4000 scholars and experts around the world who serve as their contributors and advisers. Therefore, we can get reliable and well-written knowledge and information from Britannica. Contrary to Wikipedia, knowledge there is unreliable because most contributors are anonymous and have little or no scholarly background. That is why the professors in University do not suggest us to find the information from Wikipedia.
Moreover, Britannica helps to create healthy dialog of a free society. All Britannica contributors provide alternative viewpoints in articles so as to help the viewers thinking. To the most controversial issues, there are multipute contributors to provide different opinions in longer articles in order to balance the ideas. Therefore, such high quality works improve people's critical thinking and advance a well public debate.
In order to protect loral property right, the source materials in Britannica can only be changed and revised by the authers. The system is beneficial to protect the original and completed articles. Compare with Wikipedia, there is a problem of vandalism since people can freely access to edit the articles. It makes the information more unreliable and it possibly creates the fights between writers.
Some people may argue that Britannica is not a totally free online encycopaedia. It offers short versions of articles for free, but charges $70 a years for full entry. Yes, compare with Wikipedia, Britannica is a little bit disadvantageous, but the cost is not such expensive and I think most of people can pay nowadays. Also, expending a little bit money to get trustful and well-written knowledge, it is of great worth.
To conclude, I suggest to keep Britannica as the only one online encycopaedia because of its high quality, accuracte knowledge, protecting loral property right and low cost.
It is good that Britannica "create healthy dialog of a free society".However, i think that Wikipedia can have this as well, since it is always checked up by users and reported if they find any mistakes or wrong truth. Besides, as Britannica is only in English version, less people can get benefits from it as they have the language problems.
回覆刪除Of course, Wikipedia can also create dialog of a free society, but I'm afriad that the quality of the public debate is not such high because most people there with little or no scholarly background, so we may confused to rely on the information. Besides, English is an universial language in the world and many people from different countries know English, talking us as an example, so I think it is not a big problem.
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