<p>While reading articles in the Economist, I come across many unfamiliar terms like premium, stimulus-spending, subsidy, Senate, Congress, etc., because my background knowledge on economics and politics are lacking.
I always rely on Wikipedia and google search to find the answers to these.
But many things on Wikipedia are written by ordinary people so I’m not sure if I should keep primarily relying on it for mending my gaps in background knowledge.
Should I purchase a physical encylopedia and consult this instead of Wikipedia from now on? If so, what specific brand of encyclopedia is recommended? </p>
<p>will [Encyclopedia</a> - Online Dictionary | Encyclopedia.com: Get facts, articles, pictures, video](<a href=“Encyclopedia.com | Free Online Encyclopedia”>http://www.encyclopedia.com/) satisfy your needs? having a full encyclopedia set is expensive and takes up lots of space… and it takes much longer to look things up in it compared to the computer.</p>
<p>Who tend not to write what they don’t know they’re talking about, because otherwise they get challenged by people who do know. Important, fundamental articles are monitored by Wikiprojects which are in turn led and coordinated by experts. Wikipedia is a huge bureaucracy. </p>
<p>A lot of people do “copyediting” or meta-administrative tasks like grammar cleanup, making technicalese more accessible to the public, summarising, splitting off a long article into a series of concepts – so a big topic like say, “financial derivatives” might be split into subtopics with their own main articles, which if they get too big will get further split, and so forth. Perfectly valid tasks for normal people to do, much as editors who know very little about economics in print encyclopedias copyedit articles written by experts.</p>
<p>and oh, print encyclopedias get outdated and can’t be corrected. and oh, they are also limited in their breadth (and depth) by the constraint of physics. did some federal agency modify some federal practice recently? can’t be updated… what about discoveries about the protein-protein interactions of mper1, brca2, cyclooxygenase inhibitors and so forth since basically new biological discoveries are made all the time? </p>
<p>Also, there are ways to check the quality of the article. For example, cleanup tags, talk/discussion, article history, whether the article has been certified as a “good article” or a “featured article”, article evaluations, peer review, and 100 other bureaucratic processes…</p>
<p>If you really feel the need for a “real” Encyclopedia, you can subscribe online at [Encyclopedia</a> - Britannica Online Encyclopedia](<a href=“http://www.britannica.com/]Encyclopedia”>http://www.britannica.com/) – you get the same content without having to lose the storage space on your shelves. (They offer a short free trial; the premium subscription is $70 a year).</p>
<p>Britannica is quite inferior in quality on many scientific topics (see also: the Nature review). See for example, our global warming article, which as a result of peer collaboration and peer review and extensive bureaucracy has quite surpassed the wishy-washy mish-mash Britannica has put up.</p>
<p>You can type “define: whatever” and google will look for definitions. You’ll quickly find sources that can help. There are legions of sites that define financial terms.</p>
<p>I still don’t trust Wikipedia, at least in fields like history and biography. Too many ridiculous errors. Too many articles with obvious fallacies put in as jokes, and too many such fallacies that remain because nobody’s corrected them. Too many statements with references such as “citation needed.”</p>
<p>And nothing beats my copy of the 12th edition Encyclopedia Britannica (the 11th edition plus supplementary volumes) if you happen to be interested in, say, the day-to-day details of the Eastern Front campaigns in the First World War!</p>
<p>My parents had an Encycl. Britannica that only went up to the middle of WW2. That was amusing. I have a one volume Columbia Encyclopedia, but I have to admit I never use it any more. Wikipedia is so much more convenient!</p>
<p>Oh also, EB is so Western-centric, it’s atrocious.</p>
<p>Wikipedia has day to day coverage of the Chinese Civil War and the Xinhai Revolution. EB doesn’t. Wikipedia is multilingual. EB isn’t. Wikipedia has extensive coverage of the Ta-Yuan, the post-Alexander Macedonians who made contact with China. EB doesn’t. And Amerindian languages? Forget about comprehensive coverage about any of them.</p>