Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-11-22/Book review

The Myth of the Britannica, by Harvey Einbinder

Harvey Einbinder, The Myth of the Britannica. New York: Grove Press, 1964. 390 pages.

Harvey Einbinder's extended criticism of the Encyclopædia Britannica grew out of an article he wrote for the Columbia University Forum, where he detailed errors and obsolete information in 90 articles he had looked at in depth, which was afterward reprinted in Newsweek and a number of newspapers. The Britannica, which at the time possessed a reputation for quality and accuracy, responded to Einbinder's article in a manner amazingly similar to the comparison Nature made in 2005 to Wikipedia—the management attacked the methodology of the study instead of fixing the problem. Einbinder's response was this book, a far more detailed criticism of Britannica where he not only identifies numerous articles with serious errors in their presentation, factual content and obsolete material, but included a list of 666 articles in the 1958 edition which were unchanged from the earlier ninth and eleventh editions, completed, respectively, in 1889 and 1911.

Einbinder makes a strong case in his book that the quality of this encyclopedia's scholarship and its editorial standards were substandard, and the current edition was not worthy of the name. He convinced Derek J. De Solla Price, then chairman of the Department of Science and Medicine at Yale University, who reviewed Einbinder's work for Science. In his review De Solla Price wrote, "an encyclopedia is not a substitute for conventional learning or for books. We shall have to warn students, and even schools and colleagues with increasing frequency, that not even the Encyclopaedia Britannica is more than a reference source and key to greater or lesser use of a real library."^[1]

If you are interested in obtaining the most schadenfreude for the least amount of reading, the first chapter will satisfy said desire: in less than a dozen pages, Einbinder sets forth numerous examples of embarrassing if not serious flaws in this reference work. And if you are still hungry for more scandal, chapters 20 through 22—"The Commercial Influence"; "Bold Advertising and the Hard Sell"; and "Men behind the Britannica"—will provide the ingredients anyone may need to nourish their cynicism about the corrupting tendencies of American business and institutions. Yet beyond a few hour's entertainment, what value would this book, written over 45 years ago, have for any of us today?

The version of the Encyclopedia Britannica he criticizes, which consisted of a collection of articles subjected to continuous revision, no longer exists; it was replaced in the mid-1970s by a thoroughly rewritten model, consisting of a "Propædia", a "Micropædia", and a "Macropædia".^{[notes 1]} One might assume that the only reason Wikipedians might want to read this book would be in the pleasure of dragging some of the skeletons from our competitor's closet.