Wikipedia vs. Britannica

Ben Salabura
December 3, 2007
FYS

I have looked up coal on both Wikipedia and Britannica. In Wikipedia there are whys people can contact the authors and editors of the information that is on this site. There is ways to communicate with them online such as email and on Britannica there is no real way to contact the authors. On this web site they show some authors and they tell a little something about the authors; what’s their profession, where they went to collage.
The information on Wikipedia seem to update several times a day, the earliest one was only a few hours ago and it was extremely easy to find. Britannica on the other hand did not have any source that I could find that would show when it was last updated.
Wikipedia has references and a bibliography and it has a lot of them, but Britannica has none. There are references that are clickable on the website, but they all just seem to lead straight to another website that was used to get the information from, but Wikipedia also has books, magazines, and things of that nature that are used too. Wikipedia has about forty of these different website that can be reach through this site. All of the websites that I clicked into were good, none of them did not come up, where as Britannica they just tell you how to site their work when we use it and none of this stuff is on the site. Britannica seems to just think because they are an encyclopedia they do what they want and they do not have any sort of a bibliography any where on the website.
The two websites have basically the same information in them and they are both what I would say to explain coal. Britannica’s information was better, I thought, because it was to the point and exact. Wikipedia had the same stuff, but their information was too much than they need everything they said. I did like the chart that Wikipedia had though; it was a little something that Britannica did not have.
I found that Wikipedia has a thing called talk and there are like group discussion people can have about any of the subject in Wikipidia. In discussion, which is a little tab at the top of the site, they have one long page of just little side notes that people wrote that could be added to the definition of coal and things that could be changed. These discussions are not all real accurate though. They are not cited and they are just people’s opinions. There is nothing of this talk on Britannica, I do not know why, I like it and I think it should be added in.
I like Wikipedia more than I like Britannica. People do not like Wikipedia because people can put what ever they want on there. This is true, but the definitions are current, they have their work cited and they were all legitimate websites. Britannica had all them same stuff even though it is an encyclopedia and they are all facts. I like how people can put things on the website that they want, not only because it gives us our right to freedom of speech, but it is fun to see want other people have to say. Wikipedia has a lot of information and can be extremely helpful teachers should not band students from using it.