The Value of Bought Encyclopedias
The last paragraph of this negative piece on blogs and Wikipedia fuses a few ideas I’ve been kicking around this blog recently:
“… while Wikipedia is an interesting social experiment and ‘includes information more often associated with almanacs, gazetteers and specialist magazines,’ it’s too untrustworthy to be used as a secondary source. I prefer the expensive and more reliable traditional encyclopedias for my research, for as Gabriel Biel, the German philosopher, put it 500 years ago: ‘You get what you pay for.’”
Greg Hill shows he values information he purchases over free information. He doesn’t seem to know about some of the recent research indicating Wikipedia might be better than some of its print competitors and that print encyclopedias might contain errors.
from Garrett’s blog
