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Not to say that Wikipedia is this unreliable piece of shit that should never be looked at. But one needs to have the proper perspective on how to properly use that tool. Wikipedia is simply everyone's collective knowledge pooled together and only somewhat filtered. And sometimes, there's not even any filtering at all, or just as bad, sometimes the filtering is way too extreme. Wikipedia can be very useful at times, and other times, it can be very detrimental. You gotta learn how to use it. With Britannica though, there is pretty much no need for the grains of salt that Wikipedia pretty much demands you take it with. The articles in Britannica have all gone through full sanity checks.
On top of that, the encyclopedia also has many little nice-to-haves. For example, it gives professional references on the information it has, suggests further reading on more expansive subjects, gives you an easy citation for each article you can use in your papers, provides an easy atlas for you to study, gives tools to annotate any part of an article, and even includes an incredibly expansive dictionary and thesaurus. And trust me. When you're writing, a thesaurus is actually an incredibly underrated tool. Sadly though, all this does come with one large caveat. The last physical release of this brand of encyclopedia software is from 2015. In 2023, as of this writing, that makes it over 8 years old. Yeahhh... Not exactly up to date anymore.
So, this encyclopedia is very probably not going to be the end-all-be-all of your research, but then, even when it was made, it was never supposed to be like that anyway. The best way to treat it, then, is as a foundation and a firm jumping-off point for the rest of your work. Many of the articles it has are rather evergreen as well, as in, there are some subjects where we pretty much knew at that point in 2015 what was going on with something. For example, George Washington's history was pretty well established, even back in 2015, and current understanding for that certainly isn't likely to have changed to any significant degree in 2023 or even in 2033. In fact, I actually find it a good thing to have these older sources as there have been some nasty trends as of late to revise a bunch of history to suit a narrative. It's nice to have a historical untouched source that was actually, you know, vetted by experts and not some sweaty scrub in their basement who couldn't even tell you where their damn juice came from.
EDIT: I also gotta say... Just looking at some of these articles makes me feel like a kid again in a very good way. For whatever reason, they fill me with a sense of curiosity and wonder about the world, and before I know it, it's 30 minutes later and I'm watching a video on cheetahs. And yeah, I get it's just some software encyclopedia with a few pretty graphics and videos, but damn it, I like it. As cheesy as it sounds, it's good to always be learning, and that is partially what I try to emphasize at Sanctuary. To never stop learning. Never stop asking questions. You can find cool stuff. Yes, even in some encyclopedia software released over 8 years ago.
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