The technique of creating an encyclopedia: A number of real experts are paid handsomely to write and sign lengthy articles on subjects of which they are masters, and the bulk of the work is copied from earlier encyclopedias by a large number of "Penny-a- liners." None of the articles in the Columbia are signed. You might infer from this that all articles are written by experts, but we shall have reason, presently, to doubt this.

Sex questions, for instance, which deeply interest large numbers of readers in America, are treated with an inconvenient delicacy or ignored altogether. The article "Sex" might be read in a Sunday-School, and it is perhaps creditable to the editors that they seem never to have heard, since they have not a line about them, of such things as sexology, adultery, aphrodisiacs, paederasty, sodomy, lesbianism, girdles of chastity, perversion, Ivan Bloch, Professor Kinsey, or any of the technicalities of modern sexology.

http://www.infidels.org/library/historical...edia_crime.html

Similarities and differences....

The editors may plead that they had to find room for 70,000 entries. I venture to suggest that the number could have been reduced to about 20,000 if they had omitted one to three line notices of obscure villages abroad and obscure men, from the days of the pyramids to our own time, which no one will ever read; or, at the most, some learned professor, who has other and more reliable works of reference might possibly find an interest in one of these once in 10 years.