Pages

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Group VB's arguements

Our group goes with the Britannica. And we choose Britannica for basically two reasons: accuracy and user-friendly. We have our arguments as follows.
Firstly, if only one encyclopedia can be left for human beings, it has the responsibility of the continuity of knowledge. Our offspring will have to depend on it to study, to explore, so the accuracy is very important, because we don’t want to mislead them. And Britannica is more accurate than Wikipedia. Quoted from Hioberg (senior vice president and editor in chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. ) ‘Britannica has published more than a hundred Nobel Prize winners and thousands of other well-known experts and scholars. Contrary to Wikipedia, Britannica's contributor base is transparent and not anonymous.’ This is the main reason for our choices.
Secondly, we found that Britannica is more user-friendly than Wikipedia. Here are the homepages of these two encyclopedia.
1. Britannica

2. Wikipedia

We can judge from the pictures above that although Wikipedia has a lot of information, but it is too messy, because the page is not so well-organized. As for Britannica, we have clear categories, we have dictionary and news, we also list some articles like news for today. It’s easier for us to find useful information from this well-organized page. And we searched for ‘Plato’ as a test. The result just as follows.
3. wikipedia


http://www.britannica.com/bps/search?query=Plato Britannica

Wikipedia simply pumped out a page talking about who Plato is and his theories and life and so on. It did give out great lists of footnotes, references and extensional readings. But Britannica did even better. It listed all the result on the page, and when you put your mouse on each of them there would be a brief introduction of the resources so that you can choose what to read more specifically and easily. And you can choose to read Ebook or magazine or dictionary.
As we discussed above, Britannica has obvious advantage over Wikipedia in accuracy and user-friendly. So we absolutely support Britannica to be the only encyclopedia in the world.

No comments:

Post a Comment