![]() That is what we will miss now, I think, with the migration of so much to the Internet – books, magazines, newspapers and encyclopedias. But I would also flip through its pages and read entries that caught my eye, about the Romanovs of Russia or Cleopatra or the Great Wall, lost for a while in learning. Encyclopedias are the reason why every report a kid ever wrote in that era had such a strong resemblance to an entry found there. ![]() I used it to do my schoolwork, of course. ![]() But my mother was determined to make the same statement about learning made by the families who had the Britannica on their bookshelves, and she purchased a volume of Funk & Wagnall's at the grocery store for a few dollars every month. ![]() The monthly installment payments were far too costly. The publishers would wait 25 years or more before issuing a new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica because it was so expensive. Wikipedia, begun 11 years ago with the purpose of making all information available to all people, has the advantage of immediate updates, when countries change leaders or planets are dismissed from the solar system. Though one study found that the Britannica and Wikipedia had an equal number of mistakes per entry (three or four), Wikipedia seems more vulnerable to the charge that you can't believe everything you read on the Internet. Wikipedia, in contrast, has more than 4 million articles written by tens of thousands of writers in what it likes to describe as one continuous editorial conference. ![]()
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