From Jimmy Wales, on a mailing list, talking about someone criticizing Wikipedia because (they claim) students read it uncritically:

Wikipedia invites critical dialogue with the text in a way that Britannica never could. I mean this not only in the metaphorical sense of “dialogue” — in that you can review the history of a Wikipedia article, and the discussion page, and thus come to a more informed understanding of theeditorial choices that were made. But I also mean this in a literal sense: with Wikipedia, you can simply click to ask the authors aquestions, and they will actually answer you. You can leave a note on individual author pages, or on the talk page of the article, or you can even edit the article itself.

What encyclopedia in history ever supported the notion of critical analysis so thoroughly?

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