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Yes, an Encyclopedia Britannica is, compared to Wikipedia, a paltry source of information, riddled with inaccuracies, omissions, oversimplifications, and outright fabrications. But it is one thing that Wikipedia is not: a snapshot of the dispassionate conventional wisdom of five or 10 years ago.
rejectednocomments. • 2 yr. ago. I’m sure it’s fine, but it’s a general resource as opposed to a resource dedicated specifically to philosophy. Try the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Award. 364K subscribers in the askphilosophy community. /r/askphilosophy aims to provide serious, well-researched answers to philosophical questions.
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Is Encyclopedia Britannica better than Wikipedia?
Is Encyclopedia Britannica a good source of information?
Is the Encyclopedia a good resource?
Are encyclopedias a bad source of information?
Precisely. You shouldn't write a paper using wiki as a sole source, but the same goes for Britannica. If anything, wiki cites sources, making it a much more useful tool.
FYI the Encyclopedia Britannica would not be an acceptable academic source in most contexts either. EB and Wikipedia are both very useful, for slightly different purposes, but neither is intended for academic use. They are instead used to quickly find general information about a broad range of topics.
Wikipedia isn't a source. It's a bunch of links to sources, embedded in context and indexed. Its information is only as good as the accuracy and completeness of the context, because most people will not chase down the sources. For factual matters the articles just keep getting better with more editing.
The reason that Wikipedia is not considered a "reliable" source, is based on the fact that anyone can edit it at any time. While fraudulent edits are usually caught and reversed quickly, I believe that is the biggest reason that it cant be used as an independent source for things like school papers.
Generally for research you don't want encyclopedias. (Depends on level/purpose, I guess.) "The BBC" also isn't a source. Each article or video is a source. If we're looking at credibility, it's not just the organization but sections, purposes, authors, etc that we would think about for source analysis.
