[js8]

This was already tried with Encyclopedia Britannica and it doesn't quite work.

The truth is, if you want high quality, more eyes the better. (And the article mentions that magical art was greatly improved by general accessibility of things on the Internet.)

[DougN7]

Why didn't the encyclopedia work (for its time)? Before the Internet it was the best, most information dense, source available. Not perfect, but better than any available alternatives.

[sweettea]

Heck, _during_ the age of the internet it's the best, most information dense source available, far outclassing Wikipedia on the most used topics.

[seanp2k2]

Curious about an example of this. As someone who spends many hours reading Wikipedia, the time and effort put into very niche subjects seems fantastic. I haven't opened a physical encyclopedia in probably 10 years.

[hackuser]

Britannica is online; you don't need to open a book. Go search it now.

[vacri]

Just trying now, it's slow, doesn't take me to the page by name ('Iraq' was my search), and was still trying to load from adservers as I type this. Slow to load, poorer layout that is harder to read (but not terrible), and split across multiple pages requiring another slow load. The 'demographics' section that I was looking for is needlessly split across pages. The page chugs as I scroll it up and down to read the one paragraph on-screen at any time (on a laptop with a decent CPU).

Is the information better? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know enough about the country to say. But it's a chore to read. Last updated in June 2013, so that's three-and-a-bit years without updates in a rapidly-changing part of the world.

My mother sold World Book encyclopedias when I was a kid, and we had a set. I grew up reading those cover-to-cover. There's something beautiful about having info at your fingertips that can be consumed at the speed of reading. Paper encyclopedias have it, and wikipedia has it, but online Britannica does not. Well, not from my excursion there just now.

[hackuser]

FWIW, I use Britannica regularly and don't recall ever seeing those problems. The information is clearly better, IME; there's nothing like being able to access instant expert knowledge on almost any topic. The main drawback is that the coverage is, of course, much narrower; no pokemon characters.

Crowd-sourcing can be a great tool, but not for high-integrity information. IMHO: As the public now widely accepts lies and propaganda, I've come to think that overlooking Wikipedia's accuracy problems was a forerunner to this situation. I'm sure much of Wikipedia's information is good; I just don't know which is correct and which is complete nonsense.