Imagine this

A bunch of aliens have control of the earth. For some strange alien reason, they have decided that ONE AND ONLY ONE encyclopaedia can remain in existence worldwide (in multiple languages). They have made you "World Knowledge Advisor" and ordered YOU to make the choice of encyclopaedia for all humankind. Only if you can make a choice, and back it up with good well-researched arguments, will they will allow you to live.

They have given you only two choices: an open-source online encyclopaedia such as Wikipedia or a well-respected online proprietary encyclopaedia such as Encyclopaedia Brittanica? Which will you choose? Why?

Take into account quality, accuracy, cost, the needs of particular cultures and any other factors that you feel are relevant.

HERE ARE OUR BEST PRO-ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITTANICA ARGUMENTS
Group VB
Our group goes with the Britannica. And we choose Britannica for basically two reasons: accuracy and user-friendly. We have our arguments as follows.
Firstly, if only one encyclopedia can be left for human beings, it has the responsibility of the continuity of knowledge. Our offspring will have to depend on it to study, to explore, so the accuracy is very important, because we don’t want to mislead them. And Britannica is more accurate than Wikipedia. Quoted from Hioberg (senior vice president and editor in chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. ) ‘Britannica has published more than a hundred Nobel Prize winners and thousands of other well-known experts and scholars. Contrary to Wikipedia, Britannica's contributor base is transparent and not anonymous.’ This is the main reason for our choices.
Secondly, we found that Britannica is more user-friendly than Wikipedia. Here are the homepages of these two encyclopedia.
1. Britannica

2. Wikipedia

We can judge from the pictures above that although Wikipedia has a lot of information, but it is too messy, because the page is not so well-organized. As for Britannica, we have clear categories, we have dictionary and news, we also list some articles like news for today. It’s easier for us to find useful information from this well-organized page. And we searched for ‘Plato’ as a test. The result just as follows.
3. wikipedia

http://www.britannica.com/bps/search?query=Plato Britannica

Wikipedia simply pumped out a page talking about who Plato is and his theories and life and so on. It did give out great lists of footnotes, references and extensional readings. But Britannica did even better. It listed all the result on the page, and when you put your mouse on each of them there would be a brief introduction of the resources so that you can choose what to read more specifically and easily. And you can choose to read Ebook or magazine or dictionary.
As we discussed above, Britannica has obvious advantage over Wikipedia in accuracy and user-friendly. So we absolutely support Britannica to be the only encyclopedia in the world.






HERE ARE OUR BEST PRO-WIKIPEDIA ARGUMENTS
Group Zara said:

1) Many different authors
 More information can be posted faster, on more topics. Also, errors can be corrected faster.
 With a broader spectrum of authors there is less bias and more diversity in perspectives. This creates a more democratic system.
 One example of when this was a problem for Britannica was with their article on Hinduism. More information: http://www.hinduismtoday.com/modules/xpress/hindu-press-international/2009/05/16/encyclopaedia-britannica-will-review-its-hinduism-article/
2) Better starting place for research
 Many more links to other sources on Wikipedia. Example: When we looked at both sites pages on Pablo Picasso Wikipedia listed over 60 external links while Britannica only had 10.
 More up to date information on Wikipedia since it is easier to change and update quickly. Examples of how Britannica takes longer for up to date information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Errors_in_the_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica_that_have_been_corrected_in_Wikipedia
 When a person approaches Wikipedia as a jumping off point for further research and not as their only source it makes accuracy errors not matter so much, because additional research will correct those if there are any. We consider ourselves living evidence for this point as this is how we approach our own research.

Group Happy schooldiscuss said:

FREE ACCESSING

On the internet, the concept of "free for sharing" is very important that will burst the development of everything and bring positive competition.

Wikipedia provides free access to all of human knowledge, ultimately providing free knowledge to anyone on anything. No fees or hidden costs- just knowledge. Furthermore it provides a neutral point of view. Since the writers and editors of Wikipedia are everyday people just like you and me, they provide both sides of a story, while a for-profit encyclopedia company may edit or revise articles or sides of a story in order to keep shareholders happy.

As a collaborative encyclopedia, Wikipedia allows people from a variety of backgrounds to come together to share knowledge and information with the rest of the world. It starts a dialogue about a specific topic and encourages the rest of the world to part-take in this dialogue. As a multilingual encyclopedia, Wikipedia is not an exclusive encyclopedia; one does not need to know English to understand the text. Articles in Spanish, Dutch, French, Portuguese and Chinese are just the beginning of Wikipedia’s multilingual text.

Real-Time Content
Article writers have the ability to change and update articles that in anytime, anywhere, they don’t have to go through the book publishers. So, the Wikipedia can be served as an online newspaper. The article about Manila hostage crisis is created on 23 August, right after it happened.

Group members:Penny, Maggie, Kyra, Millie, Tina said:
1. Wikipedia can make immediate changes and correction.

>The founder of the Wikipedia tells a fact that a team of elites is always behind the Wiki system in order to monitor the Wiki anytime and anyhere. So, everything on Wikipedia is always work in progress.

evidence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQR0gx0QBZ4&feature=related

>There is a great number of volunteers from all over the world who always ready to add evidence, links, proof and reference to issues.

evidence: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff

2. The accuracy of Wikipedia is high.

>Wikipedia is more neutral. Because everyone can post what they know or think on the website.

>Encyclopaedia Brittanica may contains some biased information because Brittanica didn't display its rough draft and everything must be checked by a copy editor.

>Also, there are some unaccepttable and minor errors in Brittanica.
evidence: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/jan/26/schools.uk2

Group EasyE said:

We think that wikipedia is the most popular encyclopedia in the world. As L. Gordon Crovitz said, "Wikipedia is in the top five Web sites, it is often the top result on Google searches, and it gets 97% of traffic to online encyclopedias." This indicates that wikipedia is more accessible and user friendly.

(Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123897399273491031.html)



Dale Hoiberg suggests that Wikipedia simply has a lot of people freely editing encyclopedia articles produces more balanced coverage. This encourges the people to share knowledge and discuss. The database is all-rounded and offer different arguments. So, people can think twice and justify themselves.

(Source:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115756239753455284.html)

Yee Mei MOK'a Group said:
in my opinion, the best two argument to use wikipedia rather than traditional encyclopedia are that,using wikipedia is much more convenient and the information provided in there is sometimes much more updated than the traditional encyclopedia.

first of all, the accessibilty of wikipedia is very high. nowadays, in Hong Kong, most, nearly all family have at least one computer in their home, and many of them have been already enjoying the internet services because of the bloomong development of internet company like PCCW. Thus, it is not a difficult thing for a ordinary family to search wikipedia online.
Moreover, the price of an encyclopedia is quite expensive, for example, in the official website of Commercial Press (http://www.cp1897.com.hk/simple_search_result.php?simple_words=encyclopedia&first_search=true), we can found that the price of an encyclopedia is over two hundred dollars. thus, because searching the net is much cheaper than buying an encyclopedia, must people will choose to use wikipedia to find information.

on the other hand, the information is much more updatedand rich in wikipedia, for example, the authors of The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas only fifty people (http://www.cp1897.com.hk/product_info.php?BookId=9620415892), but in wikipedia, there are any people with different knowlege can access into wikipedia and provide or correct any information, thus the information can be much more rich and well explained.

Group Good said:

Argument 1:
easy to use and learn

Wikis are instantaneous so there is no need to wait for a publisher to create a new edition or update information

people located in different parts of the world can work on the same document

the wiki software keeps track of every edit made and it's a simple process to revert back to a previous version of an article

widens access to the power of web publishing to non-technical users

the wiki has no predetermined structure - consequently it is a flexible tool which can be used for a wide range of applications

there are a wide range of open source software wiki's to choose from so licensing costs shouldn't be a barrier to installing an institutional wiki.

Criticize: The information may not accurate

Support:  Just recently the National Institute of Health launched a new initiative to encourage their scientists to edit or start new Wikipedia entries on their area of expertise to ensure that the correct information on health issues is cited. “Wikipedia articles (there are more than 2.9 million of them in English) can be initiated and edited by anyone who can access the website. Quality is informally monitored by fellow users, who can make corrections and change the text freely. All information that is posted is supposed to include citations so a reader can check the primary sources of the data,”  Washington Post article stated.

suggestion: check the primary sources which Wikipedia provided.

Support 2:

“ We have traditionally protected articles to deal with temporary attacks of vandalism. In such a state, no one could edit those articles. We did not like this, so we moved to a system of semi-protection, and the quality improvements were impressive.

We will now be experimenting, first in the German Wikipedia, with a model of flagging versions as being "nonvandalized," while still allowing editing. Each of these steps is designed to be more open, and each is also designed to help achieve higher quality.

Britannica doesn't display its rough drafts, or the articles before being checked by a copy editor; Wikipedia does. We think this sort of open transparency is healthy and results in greater quality than doing everything behind closed doors.”

Suggestion: If you feel that a certain article on Wikipedia is bias or inaccurate change it yourself OR e-mail an editor.

Read them though and upload your comments:

is the argument logical?

is it well-supported (with facts, with additional points and/with examples)?

is the argument convincing/persuasive?

how could it be improved?