might be the key to building what he called
the “World Brain”; Thomas Edison bet on
wafer-thin slices of nickel. But for most peo-
ple who were alive in the earliest days of
the internet, an encyclopedia was a book,
plain and simple. Back then, it made sense
to pit Wikipedia and Britannica against
each other. It made sense to highlight Bri-
tannica’s strengths—its rigorous editing
and fact-checking procedures; its roster of
illustrious contributors, including three US
presidents and a host of Nobel laureates,
Academy Award winners, novelists, and
inventors—and to question whether ama-
teurs on the internet could create a prod-
uct even half as good. Wikipedia was an
unknown quantity; the name for what it did,
crowdsourcing, didn’t even exist until 2005,
when two wired editors coined the word.
That same year, the journal Nature
released the first major head-to-head com-
parison study. It revealed that, for articles
on science, at least, the two resources were
nearly comparable: Britannica averaged
three minor mistakes per entry, while Wiki-
pedia averaged four. (Britannica claimed
“almost everything about the journal’s
investigation ... was wrong and misleading,” but Nature stuck by
its findings.) Nine years later, a working paper from Harvard Busi-
ness School found that Wikipedia was more left-leaning than Bri-
tannica—mostly because the articles tended to be longer and so
were likelier to contain partisan “code words.” But the bias came
out in the wash. The more revisions a Wikipedia article had, the
more neutral it became. On a “per-word basis,” the researchers
wrote, the political bent “hardly differs.”
But some important differences don’t readily show up in quan-
titative, side-by-side comparisons. For instance, there’s the fact
that people tend to read Wikipedia daily, whereas Britannica had
the quality of fine china, as much a display object as a reference
work. The edition I encountered by the roadside was in suspi-
ciously good shape. Although the covers were a little wilted, the
spines were uncracked and the pages immaculate—telltale signs
of 50 years of infrequent use. And as I learned when I retrieved as
many volumes as I could carry home, the contents are an antidote
for anyone waxing nostalgic.
I found the articles in my ’65 Britannica mostly high quality and
high minded, but the tone of breezy acumen could become impre-
cise. The section on Brazil’s education system, for instance, says it
is “good or bad depending on which statistics one takes and how
they are interpreted.” Almost all the articles are authored by white
men, and some were already 30 years out of date when they were
published. Noting this half-life in 1974, the critic Peter Prescott wrote
that “encyclopedias are like loaves of bread: the sooner used, the
better, for they are growing stale before they even reach the shelf.”
The Britannica editors took half a century to get on board with cin-
ema; in the 1965 edition, there is no entry on Luis Buñuel, one of
the fathers of modern film. You can pretty much forget about tele-
vision. Lord Byron, meanwhile, commands four whole pages. (This
conservative tendency wasn’t limited to Britannica. Growing up, I
remember reading the entry on dating in a hand-me-down World
Book and being baffled by its emphasis on sharing milkshakes.)
The worthies who wrote these entries, moreover, didn’t come
cheap. According to an article in The Atlantic from 1974, Britan-
nica contributors earned 10 cents per word, on average—about
50 cents in today’s money. Sometimes they got a full encyclope-
dia set as a bonus. They apparently didn’t show much gratitude
for this compensation; the editors complained of missed dead-
lines, petulant behavior, lazy mistakes, and outright bias. “Peo-
ple in the arts all fancy themselves good writers, and they gave
us the most difficult time,” one editor told The Atlantic. At Britan-
nica rates, the English-language version of Wikipedia would cost
$1.75 billion to produce.
There was another seldom remembered limitation to these gos-
pel tomes: They were, in a way, shrinking. The total length of paper
encyclopedias remained relatively finite, but the number of facts in