Wikipedia:Articles that are more comprehensive than on Encyclopædia Britannica
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This project page was started to identify and collect a list of articles which are more comprehensive than their Encyclopædia Britannica counterparts. Comparisons include: variety of relevant sources, better citations (footnoting or inline citations), article length, facts that are absent in the EB, and article neutrality.
In other words, can Wikipedia's process actually produce better articles than the EB, or is EB editor Robert McHenry right and we are unable to produce a better researched, better sourced and more comprehensive article?
Candidate articles
[edit]Please provide a reason why it is more comprehensive, and only include featured articles
To be verified
[edit]- Computing
- ASCII
- Comparison 1 July 2005:
- Encyclopedia Britannica: 338 words [1]
- Wikipedia: approx 2038 words (not including ASCII tables or anything after the last section before "See also" [2]
- Analysis:
- Lead section: Their summary seems to be more clear than our lead section.
- References: to be determined
- Accuracy: to be determined
- Comprehensiveness: to be determined
- Writing style: to be determined
- Comparison 1 July 2005:
- C programming language
- Comparison 1 July 2005:
- Encyclopedia Britannica: article
- Wikipedia:
- Analysis:
- Lead section: Our lead section seem more clear.
- References: to be determined
- Accuracy: to be determined
- Comprehensiveness: to be determined
- Writing style: to be determined
- Comparison 1 July 2005:
Articles that do not exist on EB
[edit]Please only list articles that have been featured
- Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport
- Dalek - EB search only finds one article: "Cushing, Peter Wilton".
- Democratic Labour Party (Trinidad and Tobago) - Wikipedia Featured Article, not in EB.
- Duran Duran - EB has lots of boxers, but only mentions the band in new wave and Neil Gaiman (who wrote an early bio of the band)
- Franklin B. Gowen - another WP:FA, searching for "Gowen" on EB only finds "Brooks, Maria Gowen" and "cypress".
- Hero of Belarus - WP:FA, they do not have it search I did.
- Indian Railways
- Jenna Jameson - no relevant hits on EB search
- Pioneer Zephyr - WP:FA, don't find it in a search at the EB site (they have an article for the railroad that owned and operated the train, but I don't see one for the train itself, even searching for "Zephyr" doesn't come up with an individual article).
- Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius - http://www.britannica.com/search?query=Uqbar comes a cropper, which may mean they don't even mention this notable story by Borges (on which we have an entire FA). Ditto for Uqbara/Ukbar/Ukbara, so they apparently don't even have anything on the geographical places alluded to in the title, on which we also have good (though not FA) articles.
- Paragraph 175 - no relevant hits on EB search
- Sylvia (ballet) - no relevant hits on EB search
- Julia Stiles - - no relevant hits on EB search
- Jean Schmidt - no relevant hits on EB search
- Helen Gandy - - no relevant hits on EB search
- James Aubrey - no relevant hits on EB search
- Cheers Referenced in a couple articles, but no article on EB search.
- Red vs. Blue - no relevant hits on EB search
- Roman Vishniac - no relevant hits on EB search
- Atomic line filter -- no relevant hits on EB search
- Diary of a Camper - no hits on EB search
- Computing
- Windows 2000 - they have a general Windows article, nothing about the specific products
- Architecture of Windows 2000 - they have a general Windows article, nothing about the specific products
- Windows XP - they have a Windows article, nothing about the specific products
- Btrieve - no such article
- Architecture of Btrieve - no such article
- Common Unix Printing System - no such article
- PaX - no such article
- Internet Explorer - no such article
- Mozilla Firefox - no such article
- Color Graphics Adapter - they have an article on Cathode Ray Tube, which talks about this topic.
- Data Encryption Standard - they have an article on data encryption, which talks about this topic.
- CPU cache - they have an article about Central Processing Unit, no article specifically about CPU cache however
- Commodore 64 - nothing whatsoever
- MDAC - nothing that I can see