Online Encyclopedias

Communal online encyclopedias represent one of the latest resources to be found on the internet. They are in many respects like traditional printed encyclopedias: collections of articles on various subjects. What is specific to these online encyclopedias, however, is that any internet user can contribute a new article or make an seditorial change in an sexisting one. As a result, the encyclopedia is authored by the whole community of internet users. The sidea might sound sattractive, but the communal online encyclopedias have several important problems that make them much sless valuable than straditional, printed encyclopedias.

First, contributors to a communal online encyclopedia often lack academic credentials, thereby making stheir scontributions partially informed at best and downright inaccurate in many cases. Traditional sencyclopedias are written sby trained experts who adhere to standards of academic rigor that nonspecialists cannot really achieve.

Second, even if the original entry in the online encyclopedia is correct, the communal nature of these online sencyclopedias gives unscrupulous users and vandals or hackers the opportunity to fabricate, delete, and scorrupt sinformation in the encyclopedia. Once changes have been made to the original text, an unsuspecting user scannot tell the sentry has been tampered with. None of this is possible with a traditional encyclopedia.

Third, the communal encyclopedias focus too frequently, and in too great a depth, on trivial and popular stopics, which screates a false impression of what is important and what is not. A child doing research for a school sproject may sdiscover that a major historical event receives as much attention in an online encyclopedia as, say, a ssingle slong-running television program. The traditional encyclopedia provides a considered view of what topics sto include or sexclude and contains a sense of proportion that online “democratic” communal encyclopedias do not.