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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

The limitations of the old style encyclopedia are immediately obvious when you go to actually use it. Thousands of articles that only barely scratch the surface on the topic. Even then if you're interested in something even mildly obscure it won't be in there at all. Of course you couldn't use it as a source when writing a paper, and worst of all they didn't even provide the sourcing information for the articles that they did have (maybe nicer ones did? The ones at my library did not), so as a research tool they were near useless.

I do remember that there was an exception for the Encyclopedia Britannica, which could be used as a source as long as it wasn't the only source. For some reason it was considered more scholarly than other encyclopedias.

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> The limitations of the old style encyclopedia are immediately obvious when you go to actually use it. Thousands of articles that only barely scratch the surface on the topic.

This is a feature not a bug: encyclopedia articles are breadth-first introductions to topics. If you are just mildly curious about something you'll probably get what you need. If you want to know more you'll have a view of the "landscape" and so will probably understand a more specialized book better -- and even be better at finding the right specialized book in the library.

I agree. We had a similar non-mainstream encyclopedia set (not F&W) when I was growing up. I was a voracious reader and, at some point, read them all back to back.

That did not provide me with in-depth knowledge about anything, but even today I have a wide general knowledge, and I am interested in many subjects, some very obscure, which I credit to that encyclopedia.

More importantly, the encyclopedia gave me an overview of human knowledge and helped me to figure out what I was most interested in. The articles about radio, radar, computers and such always fascinated me and, I think, steered me into a career in engineering.

I wonder if that’s wikipedias intent with their simple initiative. You can pull up articles by adding simple in the domain to get a less comprehensive article.

Those features are all much better provided by The Internet. Including finding and ordering a specialized physical book if you need.

> Of course you couldn't use it as a source when writing a paper

Much the same as wikipedia and similar.

But, like wikipedia, they were sometimes useful starting points with those short articles hopefully giving you a keyword or two, or a reference to other articles in the encyclopedia itself, so you had something useful to search the rest of the library (by hand or by asking the original intelligent search algorithm: a friendly librarian!) for fuller texts about.

Also as a child I remember just randomly skipping to a page and finding some interesting fact, then following the references to elsewhere. I could spend hours learning random things I'd never actually need to know that way!

> Thousands of articles that only barely scratch the surface on the topic.

Same as the Web. My experience has been that more often than not I hit "buy/pirate a book" surprisingly quickly when I start to dig past what's on Wikipedia, which is often not that much. Usually something from a university press.

Not only does Wikipedia have the same problem, they actively enforce it. If you try to add more detail, Wikipedia will reject your material on the grounds that they don't want it.

Not just Wikipedia—often, the rest of the Web doesn't have much more than Wikipedia does (sometimes less, when Wikipedia sources heavily from books), unless you count ebooks. And sometimes the book you need is print-only, even if it's fairly recent.

That's not how you use them. (at least not in my family). It was a read the whole thing deal. So much random knowledge.

We had the WorldBooks, but ran across Encyclopedia Britannica in the school libraries. The Macropaedia was _far_ more in depth than the Micropeadia, or WorldBook at its best.

> It was a read the whole thing deal. So much random knowledge.

Me too. And it taught me a skill that I think was the key to my professional success: learning how apparently unrelated things can give you the key to solving problems or understanding things that are important to you.

As a kid, encyclopedias are great sources of broad information. You probably don't need to go any deeper than they do.

As an adult, encyclopedias are a great starting point, but cannot do anything more than scratch the surface of any subject they cover.

That's just the way it is, I think.

The key advantage that printed encyclopedias have over Wikipedia is that the experts writing the articles are chosen by editors and have to be able to demonstrate broad and authoritative knowledge of the subject, before they're allowed to put those words on paper. Not so with Wikipedia.

I think the idea behind them was you'd read them and when coming across a topic of interest you'd hit up the card catalogue at the library to find books that go deeper into the topic.

"Thousands of articles that only barely scratch the surface on the topic"

I think that in one of Woody Allen films a character complains about a restaurant that "the food is terrible and the portions are too small"

This used to be false! I have my dad's copy of the ~1910 encyclopedia Britannica and they were still trying to cover the entirety of the field of mathematics in those years!

"Of course you couldn't use it as a source when writing a paper"

Why not?

My college professors said that an encyclopedia article can't be cited because it's a tertiary source of information. That's considered too far abstracted from the original source of the info to be used as a citation. Primary sources are original documents like the U.S. Constitution; secondary sources are books about the U.S. Constitution that offer some kind of analysis by professionals; tertiary sources are aggregate articles citing multiple analyses, aggregating them together like a Reader's Digest but not contributing further to the discussion like a viewpoint or stance or new info.

All of the above is explained in this article[1] (I just lazily searched for one).

Sources: 1: https://crk.umn.edu/library/primary-secondary-and-tertiary-s...

Conversely, Wikipedia policies ask article editors to use only secondary and tertiary sources when writing the encyclopedia (related to the "no original research" policy).

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