The Encyclopedia vs the Dreaded Wikipedia

I admit that I was unable to make it to class when we went over this particular topic, which is unfortunate, though I was able to get the information from the power point on D2L, hooray for online resources!  The encyclopedias are a very cool tool that we have to use in our own research.  I was surprised at the breadth of time that they have been around, almost 3000 years?  Crazy!  It is interesting to see how they have changed over the years, from being plagued with opinions and biases, which I'm sure still haven been completely taken out in current encyclopedias, to well respected and relied upon volumes of information.  The Pros for an encyclopedia are: that they have a large amount of information available in them, the wide variety that are out there, how far back some of them date, the convenience of a print bound book to read.  The cons are that the information can be dated and obsoletes without the reader being aware, there is bound to be some bias's in the works, and sometimes encyclopedias are not allowed out of the library.

Wikipedia seems to be a nice option for those who like to have information at their computer screens, and I'll admit that I too enjoy the easy convenience of just typing in a topic name and finding all sorts of useful tidbits about it.  That being said, I normally only use Wikipedia for finding out about basic things, like if I didn't know what something was, say, balderdash, what kind of word is that?  I would wiki it and then grasp its basic meaning.  I don't normally use Wikipedia for getting a whole lot of factual or historical data.  Because it has some nice pro's: easy access, its free, anyone can write or make a page, it also has some cons that make me hesitant to use it for any type of academic purpose.  The cons being: anyone can edit or make a page, all you have to do is create an account, there is no real way to know if the person who put the information there was unbiased in their research or if what they posted is even factual. 

I wasn't able to find any print encyclopedias on my topic using the online database search, or if I did, I wasn't able to figure out how to narrow it down that just encyclopedias showed up, so I was uncertain if I was looking at one or not.  I would have to try going there physically to find one.  Same thing with the e-encyclopedias.  As for reading an article on my topic from both an encyclopedia and Wikipedia, as I stated above I didn't find and encyclopedia and Wikipedia was nice for the factual information, I still wouldn't use it for any type of academical source.