I m sure that s an honest opinion It is not however one I agree with It for example assumes something like that the initial content of the article is what we are stuck with Well not on a wiki What I said about the perfect being the enemy of the good applies In a practical sense factchecking the DNB article on someone gets you further and faster than starting from scratch In a project like List of dissenting academies 1660 1800 which explores to a reasonable extent a whole sector of English and Welsh education the DNB and ODNB function as the first instance as conventional references For the types of persons mentioned the DNB articles by for example Alexander Gordon are quite respectable if you take out his intrinsic bias towards the nonconformist point of view That would not be true for those by say Alexander Balloch Grosart who as far as I know was thrown off the DNB project by Leslie Stephen This is an area where modern sources are not exactly prolific In fact I know from experience that academics themselves used to copy the old DNB shamelessly up to about 1980 anyway You are wrong in my view to see the DNB and EB1911 as the same sort of text the Britannica version of a biography is often a popularised and less scholarly take on the DNB content I have been here long enough 11 years to know the bottom line on how we self assign our tasks I get job satisfaction from DNB work because taking it all together I can improve the encyclopedia in ways that seem to me significant I could go on all night could just mention that I only encountered you because I was following up on a DNB direction and I m not sorry to have