![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() In a promotional video, the company’s editor-in-chief points out that over its history, some of the world’s most distinguished experts have contributed to Britannica-“all the way from Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie to Bill Clinton, Chris Evert, Tony Hawk, Desmond Tutu, and many others.”īy comparison, when Wikipedia tells me about Lincoln’s birthplace, it cites its information with a source-Lincoln scholar David Herbert Donald’s 1996 biography of Abe. This is Britannica’s main claim to accuracy-it invites experts to write its entries, and then its small army of fact-checkers and editors make sure that everything is correct. Current, a historian who’s written several books about Lincoln (a fact I learned on Wikipedia Britannica offers only a two-line bio of Current). Britannica’s piece is written by Richard N. To see what I mean, let’s go back to that Lincoln entry. But even if it were true that Britannica is substantially more accurate than Wikipedia, why do you want your kids to learn in a cloistered ecosystem that’s separate from the rest of the media? In today’s news environment, you can’t blindly trust anything you see-you have to question everything for yourself. This is a dubious argument a study published in Nature in 2005 found that both Wikipedia and Britannica were good references, with each getting a similarly small number of facts wrong. ![]()
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