(no subject)

I've only been reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica for like a day and already I'm reading George Eliot and shit. It's striking how broadly unlike Wikipedia traditional encyclopaedia are, even in their online forms; Wikis are something else other than reference books. What is immediately apparent is the readability of Britannica is very high and its lack of concern for exhaustive detail in favour of accuracy marks it as inherently less amateurish than but at once less interesting than wikipedia. Wikipedia is the domain of obsessives fighting a public war against besieged editors. I generally understand encyclopaedias as being written by ivory tower editors trying to put off, for as long as possible, doing any work that would require them to change anything they've already written.