The online version of Encyclopædia Brittannica had over 450 million users in 2011 and its users continue to grow. Their main competition online is the giant Wikipedia who boast a massive 36,000 million hits a year. However Encyclopædia Brittannica is a more accurate encyclopedia due to the contributors all being scholars or employees of Britannica.
Wikipedia now stands the giant of online encyclopedias with about 100 million hits every day. The free online encyclopedia is open source meaning that anyone has the ability to write an article from anywhere in the world. Wikipedia has over 4.5 million articles in English and a total of 30 million articles in total. This approach which allows anyone to make entries has led to many articles being written about a wider range of subjects than traditionally included in other encyclopedias as well as entries being added very quickly for new events.
Some downsides to this approach are the possibility of erroneous information being added some of which is deliberate. Organisation and companies are offered to have bias articles written about them for advertising purposes (we have been approached via email on several occasions).
In response to deliberate sabotage of wiki entries Wikipedia have taken some security actions such as making some articles prone to ‘vandalism’ protecte3d to some degree. Despite this risk of erroneous information an investigation in 2005 by the peer reviewed magazine Nature showed that out of 42 science based articles in both Britannica and Wikipedia, Britannica had 3 errors while wiki had 4 errors.
This graph shows the growth of articles added to the English Wikipedia site since its conception in Jan 2001. Image released under Creative Commons Attribution and ShareAlike License by Wikimedia.
This encyclopedia is a free online encyclopedia aimed solely for students studying GCSE and undergraduate courses. We aim to use as many graphics as possible; studies have proven this aids in revision and study.
Encyclopedias are more than 2000 years old and early versions would have been a collection of works on Natural history. In fact the oldest surviving encyclopedia is ‘Naturalis Historia’ (natural history) which was published in AD 77/79 and is a relic from the Roman Empire. Many other early encyclopaedias would have mainly covered the vast subject of natural history where as today's attempt is made to cover as many additional subjects as possible.
The Encyclopædia Britannica is one of the oldest and most reliable encyclopaedia in the English language. It was first produced in Edinburgh, Scotland in the 18th Centaury during a period known as the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’.
The Scottish Enlightenment was a period of time that Scotland enjoyed a great intellectual age with the highest amount of literate inhabitants in the world as well as a wealth of Scottish Philosophers, writers, poets, thinkers and scientists. This golden age for learning in Scotland led Colin Macfarquhar (a printer) and Andrew Bell (an engraver) to creating an encyclopaedia which they named the Encyclopædia Brittannica after the Latin for British Encyclopaedia.
The First editor for the Encyclopædia Brittannica was a Scholar by the name of William Smellie. It took three years to produce and had only three volumes which were completed and published in 1771. The encyclopedia was such a success that a second edition quickly followed this time with ten volumes. The success grew and the Encyclopædia Brittannica continued to print new editions until 2012 (which was its 2010 edition). This edition contained 32 volumes with over 4,000 contributors including 110 Nobel Prize Winners and over 7 million copies have been sold (including all Editions). The Britannica group decided to end its print edition after a total of 244 years and to focus all its efforts on its online version on the encyclopedia.
