Thoughts on Wikipedia and EB.

For me, the first term that came up when trying to compare Wikipedia to Encyclopedia Britannica was "Marshall McLuhan." He is not only a well known author but he has also influenced our contemporary view on media. First I searched for the term in Wikipedia, which resulted in a massive article about Marshall McLuhan and almost anything relating to him. When looking for the same term on the EB-site, the result was not that very satisfying.

At first, the text looked like a short introduction and my eyes immediately searched for links to reveal the rest of the material, but no; what I thought was the introduction was actually the entire article for this well known figure. The text simply presented McLuhan’s life and achievements in less than one page. One of the reasons why I chose to search for McLuhan was also that he often is cited or mentioned by many experts when they discuss or write about, for instance, "media". Since the EB-website is written by experts, I thought it would be obvious that such an influential person would be presented with, at least, more than 200 words.

Anyway, on Wikipedia, the information is structured in a very clear way; the text begins with a short description of the term "Marshall McLuhan" and continues with a box that contains an overview of the different paragraphs of the article. If one scroll down the website, the paragraphs become visible. Nevertheless, On EB, the text is just displayed as static text with no obvious structure. For example, they could have used some sort of site map or overview with links, as Wikipedia does.
However, I tried one more search on both sites. This time I searched for "Joost." Joost is an upcoming web 2.0 TV-service, created by the founders of Skype and Kazaa, which will use peer to peer technology to connect people's computers and broadcast live TV. Wikipedia did not surprise, once again the search resulted in a rather long article about the subject. Encyclopedia Britannica, on the other hand, did not find anything.

What strikes me is how much information one can find on Wikipedia and that the service, most of the times, has very fresh information to deliver. Still, the content may seem somewhat inaccurate or sometimes misleading, since the articles are written by many non-experts, but I think that eventually the content will be corrected, since anyone can come with suggestions, which therefore include experts as well. Encyclopedia Britannica seem to have quality articles, but the many times the user cannot find what he or she is looking for, since EB seem to leave out so many areas, makes Wikipedia more tempting.

Wikipedia is a folksonomy website that grows and becomes stronger when more people are using the service. The fact that people contribute with their knowledge to feed this forever-growing database of wisdom, obviously unite the world to some degree. Although Wikipedia does not reflect the ideals of a country or nation, it indeed reflects the ideals of the world, and especially, it keeps up with the time we are living in.