Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia Britannica

Wikipedia is one of the largest, multilingual, web-based, free content and non-profitable reference Web sites and encyclopedia on the Internet since 2001. I am using Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica most of the time when I need to know any kinds of article. My observations on these two encyclopedias are as follows:

Free content

Wikipedia is a web-based, free content encyclopedia and it is written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world. Users do not have to pay while accessing Wikipedia but EB does not allow unpaid users to access their sources.

Organization

I found Wikipedia is more organized than Encyclopedia Britannica. In Wikipedia all the topics and articles are listed with the proper content and heading. So users do not need to read the whole article if they are searching for a specific content on an article. For instance, if someone is interested to read the Second Life protocol then he/she does not need to read the whole article about Second Life to get the information. The users can easily find the item under the content of Second Life and they just only need a single click to reach there.

Easy Access

For a user, Wikipedia is very easy to access and it takes less downloading time to the browser than Encyclopedia Britannica. Users do not need to signup to Wikipedia to get resources. They just only need to type their searching item in the searching box and they will have it with the one click.

Easy writing and Editing

Wikipedia is an ongoing work to which in principle anybody can contribute from any part of the world. People can write and edit an article without any sort of problem. The name Wikipedia is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a type of collaborative website) and encyclopedia. The word ‘wiki’ means a website that allows visitors to add, remove, edit and change content. Every day millions of visitors make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to enhance the amount of knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia. Visitors do not need any specialized qualifications to contribute, since their primary role is to write articles and people of all ages therefore can write Wikipedia articles. Besides, the articles of the EB are aimed at educated adult readers, and written by the staff of Encyclopedia Britannica. Users are not allowed to add a single word in it.

Reliability

I have found Encyclopedia Britannica is more reliable than Wikipedia because EB has 19 full-time editors and over 4,000 expert contributors. EB is called one of the most reliable encyclopedias on earth by the scholars. On the other hand Wikipedia has over 75,000 active contributors working on more than 5,300,000 articles and most of them are amateurs. And No Original Research (NOR) is one of the three content policies of Wikipedia because It is not the place for original research.

I have chosen an article named Short message service (SMS) and searched about it on Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica. My findings were as follows in the two encyclopedias:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_message_service

http://search.eb.com.miman.bib.bth.se/eb/article-9403611

Short message service (SMS) is described in an excellent way in thw Wikipedia than Encyclopedia Britannica. I did not find the article in EB in the same name. I found it as “Text Messaging: WAN2TLK?”. The article in Wikipedia is very rich in context and easy to understand. Users could easily have the idea, technical details, popularity, and utility about SMS while they read it.

On the other hand, in EB the article starts and ends with only the using information of Text Messaging. It is very tough to get the complete idea about text messaging. For instance, what a text message is, the technical information, how does it works etc are absent in the article.

Wikipedia as Social and intellectual experience

Wikipedia is not only an encyclopedia but also a digital culture for us. People from all over the world can contribute by writing and editing an article in Wikipedia. By working and joining in such kind of platform writers and readers are developing a culture and getting involved it day by day and having the social and intellectual experience.