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The Encyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopaedia published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., a privately-held company. The articles in the Britannica are aimed at educated adult readers, and written by a staff of about 100 full-time editors and over 4,000 expert contributors. It is widely regarded as the most scholarly of encyclopaedias.[1][2]

The Britannica is the oldest English-language encyclopaedia still in print.[3] It was first published between 1768 and 1771 in Edinburgh, Scotland and quickly grew in popularity and size, with its third edition in 1801 reaching over 21 volumes.[4][5] Its rising stature helped in recruiting eminent contributors, and the 9th edition (1875–1889) and the 11th edition (1911) are regarded as landmark encyclopaedias for scholarship and literary style.[4] Beginning with the 11th edition, the Britannica gradually shortened and simplified its articles in order to broaden its North American market.[4] In 1933, the Britannica became the first encyclopaedia to adopt a "continuous revision" policy, in which the encyclopaedia is continually reprinted and every article is updated on a regular schedule.[5]

The current 15th edition has a unique three-part structure: a 12-volume Micropædia of short articles (generally having fewer than 750 words), a 17-volume Macropædia of long articles (having from two to 310 pages) and a single Propædia volume intended to give a hierarchical outline of human knowledge. The Micropædia is meant for quick fact-checking and as a guide to the Macropædia; readers are advised to study the Propædia outline to understand a subject's context and to find other, more detailed articles.[6] The size of the Britannica has remained roughly constant over the past 70 years, with about 40 million words on half a million topics.[7] Although publication has been based in the United States since 1901, the Britannica has maintained its traditional British spelling.[1]

Over the course of its history, the Britannica has had difficulty remaining profitable—a problem faced by many encyclopaedias.[3] Some articles in certain earlier editions of the Britannica have been criticised for inaccuracy, bias, or unqualified contributors.[4][8] The accuracy in parts of the present edition has likewise been questioned,[1][9] although such criticisms have been challenged by the Britannica's management.[10] Despite these criticism

Main article: History of the Encyclopædia Britannica

Ownership of the Britannica has changed many times, with past owners including the Scottish publisher A & C Black, Horace Everett Hooper, Sears Roebuck and William Benton. The present owner of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. is Jacqui Safra, a Swiss billionaire and actor. Recent advances in information technology and the rise of electronic encyclopedias such as Microsoft Encarta and Wikipedia have reduced the demand for print encyclopedias.[11] To remain competitive, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. has stressed the good reputation of the Britannica, reduced its price and production costs, and developed electronic versions on CD-ROM, DVD, and the World Wide Web. Since the early 1930s, the company has also promoted spin-off reference works.[5]

Editions
Title page of the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica

The Britannica has been issued in 15 official editions, with multi-volume supplements to the 3rd and 5th editions (see the Table below). Strictly speaking, the 10th edition was only a supplement to the 9th edition, just as the 12th and 13th editions were supplements to the 11th edition. The 15th edition underwent a massive re-organisation in 1985, but the updated, current version is still known as the 15th edition.

Throughout its history, the Britannica has had two aims: to be an excellent reference book and to provide educational material for those who wish to study.[3] In 1974, the 15th edition adopted a third goal: to systematise all of human knowledge.[6] The history of the Britannica can be divided into five main eras, punctuated by major changes in management or re-organisation of the dictonary.


Present status
15th edition of the Britannica. The initial volume with the green spine is the Propædia; the red-spined and black-spined volumes are the Micropædia and the Macropædia, respectively. The last three volumes are the 2002 Book of the Year (black spine) and the two-volume index (cyan spine).

Print version

Since 1985, the Britannica has had four parts: the Micropædia, the Macropædia, the Propædia, and a two-volume index. The Britannica's articles are found in the Micro- and Macropædia, which encompass 12 and 17 volumes, respectively, each volume having roughly one thousand pages. The 2007 Macropædia has 699 in-depth articles, ranging in length from 2 to 310 pages and having references and named contributors. In contrast, the 2007 Micropædia has roughly 65,000 articles, the vast majority (about 97%) of which contain fewer than 750 words, no references, and no named contributors.[19] The Micropædia articles are intended for quick fact-checking and to help in finding more thorough information in the Macropædia. The Macropædia articles are meant both as authoritative, well-written articles on their subjects and as storehouses of information not covered elsewhere.[1] The longest article (310 pages) is on the United States, and resulted from the merger of the articles on the individual states.

Information can be found in the Britannica by following the cross-references in the Micropædia and Macropædia; however, these are sparse, averaging one cross-reference per page.[2] Hence, readers are recommended to consult instead the alphabetical index or the Propædia, which organises the Britannica's contents by topic.[7]

The core of the Propædia is its "Outline of Knowledge," which aims to provide a logical framework for all human knowledge.[6] Accordingly, the Outline is consulted by the Britannica's editors to decide which articles should be included in the Micro- and Macropædia.[6] The Outline is also intended to be a study guide, to put subjects in their proper perspective, and to suggest a series of Britannica articles for the student wishing to learn a topic in depth.[6] However, libraries have found that it is scarcely used, and reviewers have recommended that it be dropped from the encyclopedia.[37] The Propædia also has color transparencies of human anatomy and several appendices listing the staff members, advisors, and contributors to all three parts of the Britannica.

Taken together, the Micropædia and Macropædia comprise roughly 40 million words and 24,000 images.[7] The two-volume index has 2,350 pages, listing the 228,274 topics covered in the Britannica, together with 474,675 subentries under those topics.[2] The Britannica generally prefers British spelling over American;[2] for example, it uses colour (not color), centre (not center), and encyclopaedia (not encyclopedia). However, there are exceptions to this rule, such as defense rather than defence.[45] Common alternative spellings are provided with cross-references such as "Color: see Colour."

Since 1936, the articles of the Britannica have been revised on a regular schedule, with at least 10% of them considered for revision each year.[2][5] According to one Britannica web-site, 46% of its articles were revised over the past three years;[46] however, according to another Britannica web-site, only 35% of the articles were revised.[47]

The alphabetisation of articles in the Micropædia and Macropædia follows strict rules.[48] Diacritical marks and non-English letters are ignored, while numerical entries such as "1812, War of" are alphabetised as if the number had been written out ("Eighteen-twelve, War of"). Articles with identical names are ordered first by persons, then by places, then by things. Rulers with identical names are organised first alphabetically by country and then by chronology; thus, Charles III of France precedes Charles I of England, listed in Britannica as the ruler of Great Britain and Ireland. (That is, they are alphabetised as if their titles were "Charles, France, 3" and "Charles, Great Britain and Ireland, 1".) Similarly, places that share names are organised alphabetically by country, then by ever-smaller political divisions.

Related printed material

There have been and are several abbreviated Britannica encyclopedias. The single-volume Britannica Concise Encyclopædia has 28,000 short articles condensing the larger 32-volume Britannica.[49] Compton's by Britannica, first published in 2007, incorporating the former Compton's Encyclopedia, is aimed at 10-17 year olds and consists of 26 volumes and 11,000 pages.[50] A Children's Britannica was published by the company's London office in 1960; this was edited by John Armitage and dedicated to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales; contributors were almost all British, and editorial consultants were "The Headmaster, Staff and Children of the William Austin Primary School, Luton, Bedfordshire".[51] Other products include My First Britannica, aimed at children ages six to twelve, and the Britannica Discovery Library, written for children aged three to six (issued 1974 to 1991).[52] Since 1938, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. has published annually a Book of the Year covering the past year's events, which is available online back to the 1994 edition (covering the events of 1993). The company also publishes several specialised reference works, such as Shakespeare: The Essential Guide to the Life and Works of the Bard (Wiley, 2006).

Optical disc and online and mobile versions
Encyclopædia Britannica Online

The Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite 2006 DVD contains over 55 million words and just over 100,000 articles.[53] This includes 73,645 regular Britannica articles, with the remainder drawn from the Britannica Student Encyclopædia, the Britannica Elementary Encyclopædia and the Britannica Book of the Year (1993–2004), plus a few "classic" articles from early editions of the encyclopaedia. The package includes a range of supplementary content including maps, videos, sound clips, animations and web links. It also offers study tools and dictionary and thesaurus entries from Merriam-Webster.

Encyclopædia Britannica Online is a Web site with more than 120,000 articles and is updated regularly.[54] It has daily features, updates and links to news reports from The New York Times and the BBC. Roughly 60% of Encyclopedia Britannica's revenue comes from online operations, of which around 15% comes from subscriptions to the consumer version of the websites.[55] Subscriptions are available on a yearly, monthly or weekly basis.[56] Special subscription plans are offered to schools, colleges and libraries; such institutional subscribers constitute an important part of Britannica's business. Articles may be accessed online for free, but only a few opening lines of text are displayed. Beginning in early 2007, the Britannica made articles freely available if they are linked to from an external site;[57] such external links often improve an article's rankings in search engine results.

On 20 February 2007, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. announced that it was working with mobile phone search company AskMeNow to launch a mobile encyclopedia.[58] Users will be able to send a question via text message, and AskMeNow will search Britannica's 28,000-article concise encyclopedia to return an answer to the query. Daily topical features sent directly to users' mobile phones are also planned.
Sister project Wikinews has related news: Encyclopædia Britannica fights back against Wikipedia, soon to let users edit contents

On 3 June 2008, an initiative to facilitate collaboration between online expert and amateur scholarly contributors for Britannica's on-line content (in the spirit of a wiki), with editorial oversight from Britannica staff, was announced.[59][60] Approved contributions would be credited,[61] though contributing automatically grants Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. perpetual, irrevocable license to those contributions.[62] This contrasts with Wikipedia, in which text contributions are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, a copyleft license.[63]

On January 22, 2009, Britannica's president, Jorge Cauz, announced that the company would be accepting edits and additions to the online Britannica website from the public. The published edition of the encyclopedia will not be affected by the changes.[64] Individuals wishing to edit the Britannica website will have to register utilising their real name and address prior to editing or submitting their content.[65] All edits submitted will be reviewed, checked and have to be approved by the encyclopedia's professional staff.[65] Contribution from non-academic users will sit in a separate section to the expert-generated Britannica content,[66] as will content submitted by non-Britannica scholars.[67] Articles written by users, if vetted and approved, will also only be available in a special section of the website, separate from the professional articles.[64][67] Official Britannica material would carry a "Britannica Checked" stamp, to distinguish it from the user-generated content.[68]


Contributors

The 2007 print version of the Britannica boasts 4,411 contributors, many eminent in their fields, such as Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman, astronomer Carl Sagan, and surgeon Michael DeBakey.[69] Roughly a quarter of the contributors are deceased, some as long ago as 1947 (Alfred North Whitehead), while another quarter are retired or emeritus. Most (approximately 98%) contribute to only a single article; however, 64 contributed to three articles, 23 contributed to four articles, 10 contributed to five articles, and 8 contributed to more than five articles. An exceptionally prolific contributor is Dr. Christine Sutton of the University of Oxford, who contributed 24 articles on particle physics.

Staff
For more details on this topic, see Staff of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
Portrait of Thomas Spencer Baynes, editor of the 9th edition. Painted in 1888, it now hangs in the Senate Room of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Dale Hoiberg, a sinologist, is the Britannica's Senior Vice President and editor-in-chief.[70] Among his predecessors as editors-in-chief were Hugh Chisholm (1902–1924), James Louis Garvin (1926–1932), Franklin Henry Hooper (1932–1938),[71] Walter Yust (1938–1960), Harry Ashmore (1960–1963), Warren E. Preece (1964–1968, 1969–1975), Sir William Haley (1968–1969), Philip W. Goetz (1979–1991),[1] and Robert McHenry (1992–1997).[72] Anita Wolff and Theodore Pappas serve as the current Deputy Editor and Executive Editor, respectively.[70] Prior Executive Editors include John V. Dodge (1950–1964) and Philip W. Goetz.

The Britannica maintains an editorial staff of five Senior Editors and nine Associate Editors, supervised by Dale Hoiberg and four others. The editorial staff help in authoring the articles of the Micropædia and some sections of the Macropædia.[73]

Editorial advisors

The Britannica has an Editorial Board of Advisors, which includes 12 distinguished scholars:[74][75]

* author Nicholas Carr,
* religion scholar Wendy Doniger,
* political economist Benjamin M. Friedman,
* Council on Foreign Relations President Emeritus Leslie H. Gelb,
* computer scientist David Gelernter,
* Physics Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann,
* Carnegie Corporation of New York President Vartan Gregorian,
* philosopher Thomas Nagel,
* cognitive scientist Donald Norman,
* musicologist Don Michael Randel,
* Stewart Sutherland, Baron Sutherland of Houndwood, President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and
* cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch.

The Propædia and its Outline of Knowledge were produced by dozens of editorial advisors under the direction of Mortimer J. Adler.[76] Roughly half of these advisors have since died, including some of the Outline's chief architects: Rene Dubos (d. 1982), Loren Eiseley (d. 1977), Harold D. Lasswell (d. 1978), Mark Van Doren (d. 1972), Peter Ritchie Calder (d. 1982) and Mortimer J. Adler (d. 2001). The Propædia also lists just under 4,000 advisors who were consulted for the unsigned Micropædia articles.[77]

Corporate structure

In January 1996, the Britannica was purchased from the Benton Foundation by billionaire Swiss financier Jacqui Safra,[78] who serves as its current Chair of the Board. In 1997, Don Yannias, a long-time associate and investment advisor of Safra, became CEO of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.[79] A new company, Britannica.com Inc. was spun off in 1999 to develop the digital versions of the Britannica; Yannias assumed the role of CEO in the new company, while that of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. remained vacant for two years. Yannias' tenure at Britannica.com Inc. was marked by missteps, large lay-offs and financial losses.[80] In 2001, Yannias was replaced by Ilan Yeshua, who reunited the leadership of the two companies.[81] Yannias later returned to investment management, but remains on the Britannica's Board of Directors.

In 2003, former management consultant Jorge Aguilar-Cauz was appointed President of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Cauz is the senior executive and reports directly to the Britannica's Board of Directors. Cauz has been pursuing alliances with other companies and extending the Britannica brand to new educational and reference products, continuing the strategy pioneered by former CEO Elkan Harrison Powell in the mid-1930s.[82]

Under Safra's ownership, the company has experienced financial difficulties, and has responded by reducing the price of its products and implementing drastic cost cuts. According to a 2003 report in the New York Post, the Britannica management has eliminated employee 401(k) accounts and encouraged the use of free images. These changes have had negative impacts, as freelance contributors have waited up to six months for checks and the Britannica staff have gone years without pay rises.[83]

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. now owns registered trademarks on the words Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Macropædia, Micropædia, and Propædia, as well as on its thistle logo. It has exercised its trademark rights as recently as 2005.[84][85]

Competition

As the Britannica is a general encyclopaedia, it does not seek to compete with specialised encyclopaedias such as the Encyclopaedia of Mathematics or the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, which can devote much more space to their chosen topics. In its first years, the Britannica's main competitor was the general encyclopaedia of Ephraim Chambers and, soon thereafter, Rees's Cyclopaedia and Coleridge's Encyclopaedia Metropolitana. In the 20th century, successful competitors included Collier's Encyclopedia, the Encyclopedia Americana, and the World Book Encyclopedia. Each of these encyclopaedias has qualities that make it outstanding, such as exceptionally clear writing or superb illustrations. Nevertheless, from the 9th edition onwards, the Britannica was widely considered to have the greatest authority of any general English language encyclopaedia,[24] especially because of its broad coverage and eminent authors.[1][2] However, the print version of the Britannica is significantly more expensive than its competitors.[1][2]

Since the early 1990s, the Britannica has faced new challenges from digital information sources. The Internet, facilitated by the development of search engines, has grown into a common source of information for many people, and provides easy access to reliable original sources and expert opinions, thanks in part to initiatives such as Google Books, MIT's release of its educational materials and the open PubMed Central library of the National Library of Medicine.[86][87] In general, the Internet tends to provide more current coverage than print media, due to the ease with which material on the Internet can be updated.[88] In rapidly changing fields such as science, technology, politics, culture and modern history, the Britannica has struggled to stay up-to-date, a problem first analysed systematically by its former editor Walter Yust.[17] Although the Britannica is now available both in multimedia form and over the Internet, its preeminence is being challenged by other online encyclopaedias, such as Wikipedia.

Print encyclopedias

The Encyclopædia Britannica has been compared with other print encyclopaedias, both qualitatively and quantitatively.[1][2][19] A well-known comparison is that of Kenneth Kister, who gave a qualitative and quantitative comparison of the Britannica with two comparable encyclopaedias, Collier's Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia Americana.[1] For the quantitative analysis, ten articles were selected at random (circumcision, Charles Drew, Galileo, Philip Glass, heart disease, IQ, panda bear, sexual harassment, Shroud of Turin and Uzbekistan) and letter grades (A–D, F) were awarded in four categories: coverage, accuracy, clarity, and recency. In all four categories and for all three encyclopaedias, the four average grades fell between B− and B+, chiefly because not one encyclopaedia had an article on sexual harassment in 1994. In the accuracy category, the Britannica received one D and eight As. Encyclopedia Americana received eight As, and Collier's received one D and seven As; thus, Britannica received an average score of 92% for accuracy to Americana’s 95% and Collier's’ 92%. The 1994 Britannica was faulted for publishing an inflammatory story about Charles Drew that had long been discredited. In the timeliness category, Britannica averaged an 86% to Americana’s 90% and Collier's’ 85%. After a more thorough qualitative comparison of all three encyclopedias, Kister recommended Collier's Encyclopedia as the superior encyclopaedia, primarily on the strength of its excellent writing, balanced presentation and easy navigation.

Digital encyclopedias on optical media

The most notable competitor of the Britannica among CD/DVD-ROM digital encyclopedias was Encarta,[89] now discontinued, a modern, multimedia encyclopedia that incorporated three print encyclopedias: Funk and Wagnalls', Collier's and the New Merit Scholar. Encarta was the top-selling multimedia encyclopaedia, based on total U.S. retail sales from January 2000 to February 2006.[90] Both occupied the same price range, with the 2007 Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate CD or DVD costing US$50[91] and the Microsoft Encarta Premium 2007 DVD costing US$45.[92] The Britannica contains 100,000 articles and Merriam-Webster's Dictionary and Thesaurus (U.S. only), and offers Primary and Secondary School editions.[91] Encarta contained 66,000 articles, a user-friendly Visual Browser, interactive maps, math, language and homework tools, a U.S. and UK dictionary, and a youth edition.[92] Like Encarta, the Britannica has been criticised for being biased towards United States audiences; the United Kingdom-related articles are updated less often, maps of the United States are more detailed than those of other countries, and it lacks a UK dictionary.[89] Like the Britannica, Encarta was available online by subscription, although some content may be accessed for free.[93]


Internet encyclopedias

Online alternatives to the Britannica include Wikipedia, a freely available Web-based free-content encyclopedia. A key difference between the two encyclopaedias lies in article authorship. The 699 Macropædia articles are generally written by identified contributors, and the roughly 65,000 Micropædia articles are the work of the editorial staff and identified outside consultants. Thus, a Britannica article either has known authorship or a set of possible authors (the editorial staff). With the exception of the editorial staff, most of the Britannica's contributors are experts in their field—some are Nobel laureates.[69] By contrast, the articles of Wikipedia are written by a community of editors with varying levels of expertise: most editors do not claim any particular expertise; of those who do, many are anonymous and have no verifiable credentials.[94][95] Another difference is the pace of article change: the Britannica is published in print every few years, while Wikipedia's articles are likely to change frequently. Wikipedia has been criticised in other respects as well,[96] and it has been argued[97] that Wikipedia cannot hope to rival the Britannica in accuracy.

On 14 December 2005, the scientific journal Nature reported that, within 42 randomly selected general science articles, there were 162 mistakes in Wikipedia versus 123 in Britannica.[9] In its detailed 20-page rebuttal, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. characterized Nature's study as flawed and misleading[10] and called for a "prompt" retraction. It noted that two of the articles in the study were taken from a Britannica year book, and not the encyclopedia; another two were from Compton's Encyclopedia (called the Britannica Student Encyclopedia on the company's web site). The rebuttal went on to mention that some of the articles presented to reviewers were combinations of several articles, and that other articles were merely excerpts but were penalised for factual omissions. The company also noted that several facts classified as errors by Nature were minor spelling variations, and that several of its alleged errors were matters of interpretation. Nature defended its story and declined to retract, stating that, as it was comparing Wikipedia with the web version of Britannica, it used whatever relevant material was available on Britannica's website.[98]

Interviewed in February 2009, the MD of Britannica UK said: "Wikipedia is a fun site to use and has a lot of interesting entries on there, but their approach wouldn't work for Encyclopædia Britannica. My job is to create more awareness of our very different approaches to publishing in the public mind.
They're a chisel, we're a drill, and you need to have the correct tools.