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BY MICHAEL BLANDING

For more than a century, the long, stately rows ofEncyclopdia Britannica have been a fixture on the shelves of many an educated persons homethe smooshed-together diphthong in the first word a symbol of old-world erudition and gravitas. So it was a shock to many when, in 2012, the venerable institution announced it would no longer publish a print version of its multivolume compendium of knowledge.

Though the Britannica would still be available online, the writing on the virtual wall was clear: It had been supplanted by the Internet. And more specifically, by an upstart phenomenon Wikipedia, the free, crowd-sourced encyclopedia that since its inception in 2001 had rapidly become the new go-to source for knowledge.

Its sad to see the trajectory ofEncyclopdia Britannica, says Feng Zhu, an assistant professor in the Technology and Operations Management unit at Harvard Business School, who details the rise and fall of the information giant in a new working paper. There has been lots of research on the accuracy of Wikipedia, and the results are mixedsome studies show it is just as good as the experts, others show [that] Wikipedia is not accurate at all.

Complicating matters, however, many of the topics that we look up in the Britannicaany encyclopediaarent factually cut-and-dried. Most of the topics of content we are dealing with on a daily basis do not have a verifiable answer, says Zhu. They can be quite subjective or even controversial.

History, they say, is written by the victors, and can read very differently depending on who is telling the tale. Even modern-day issues such as immigration, gun control, abortion, and foreign policy are open to fervent debate depending on who is doing the opining. Over the years, Britannica has handled this uncertainty by seeking out the most distinguished experts in their fields in an attempt to provide a sober analysis on topics; while Wikipedia has urged its civilian editors to maintain what it calls a neutral point of view (NPOV).

Who is more objective

But is objectivity better achieved by considering one viewpoint or thousands? Along with cowriter Shane Greenstein of Northwesterns Kellogg School of Management, Zhu asks that question in a new paper, Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopdia Britannica and Wikipedia.

Zhu and Greenstein have long been interested in the question of crowd bias, which itself has been hotly debated by scholars in many fields including psychology and politics over the centuries. Are two heads better than one, or do too many cooks spoil the broth? Does the collective will of the majority lead to democratic consensus or fundamentalist groupthink?

The massive, ongoing natural experiment of Wikipedia offers a unique view into these questions. The Internet makes it so easy for people to aggregate; some scholars worry that people will self-select into groups with a similar ideology, says Zhu. As a result, the Internet may lead to more biased opinions, which only harden over time as users separate into rival virtual camps.

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Wikipedia Or Encyclopdia Britannica: Which Has More Bias?