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.
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.
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.
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.
I dunno, I'm not seeing it. I've just done another search, this time on 'resistor'. The Britannica article is a paragraph, whereas the Wikipedia one goes into a lot of depth on styles, history, etc. Notably, neither article has a diagram referring to the colour bars...
I get a similar differential with 'orchestra', where the wikipedia article goes into much more depth, not just about composition, but also about things like selection criteria. 'Grasses' gets the same kind of results as 'resistors' - one paragraph in EB, lengthy page on WP. At this point, I ran out of free views :)
(I was purposefully avoiding subjective topics like biographies, as no matter what is written in a biography, you can always find something to complain about.)
If it works for you, keep using it, I guess. But I found it slow, poorly laid-out, with fewer pictorial examples, and at least for the selections above, the inferior source.
> As the public now widely accepts lies and propaganda
The public has always done this. Yellow journalism has been there since the start, and propaganda goes back at least as far as Ancient Egyptian steles (damn, should have looked that one up). The only thing that's new (IMO) is the 24-hour news cycle, which has given everyone 'scandal fatigue'. When scandals are coming at you thick and strong, you just can't care about them anymore.