Know It All

1) Wikipedia is half resource, half social experiment, a fact that in many ways makes it great, and is also in many ways it's obvious Achilles heel. Another point presented by the author is the unevenness with which Wikipedia has been compiled, every top twelve contestant on american idol has an entire page, while not all of Chaucer's Canterbury tales have been completed.

2) In the fourth paragraph, Schiff talks about the fact that "Nothing about high-minded collaboration guarantees accuracy, and open editing invites abuse," and as supporting evidence she cites the constant of "Senators and congressmen ... being caught tampering with their entries; the entire House of Representatives has been banned from Wikipedia several times. (It is not subtle to change Senator Robert Byrd’s age from eighty-eight to a hundred and eighty. It is subtler to sanitize one’s voting record in order to distance oneself from an unpopular President, or to delete broken campaign promises.)" This particular piece of evidence is both funny and enlightening, as it shows an easily understandable and accessible instance of abuse, this seems far more interesting than the case or ideological opponents changing the entries on climate change and healthcare.

3) In a lot of ways, comparing the Encyclopedia Britannica to Wikipedia is unfair to both, as neither has the pretension of beating or even of being the other. It is, in many ways, more useful to compare Wikipedia not to the Encyclopedia Britannica, but to the entire reference and non-fiction sections of the Library of Congress. When put in these terms, Wikipedia is far more easily navigable, and yet less knowledgeable, on a similar range of topics. While the Encyclopedia Britannica strives to create virtual essays for each of the topics it covers, Wikipedia can simply loosely tie a list together with conjunctions and call it an entry in progress, so even though error rates are very similar, the quality and readability of the two are virtually incomparable. Wikipedia is good for finding about a topic, the Encyclopedia Britannica is better for understanding a topic.