Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Notes on reading the Encyclopædia

The Ninth Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica is more than one hundred years old, and so the style and presentation is somewhat different from what people expect today. Some notes by Wikipedians are given here to assist the reader in understanding the text.

POV issues

The point of view held by the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica is roughly the one of the British and American educated classes in the latter half of 19th century (the Victorian era). Any topic that would be sensitive to this point-of-view (POV) should be considered potentially biased, and verified with other sources before being copied and pasted into Wikipedia. Examples of biased articles imported in Wikipedia are the ones about [add some examples here]. Often, an acceptably non-POV article can be obtained by filtering out or moderating biased or inaccurate statements.

The Wikisource version of the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica must never be edited for POV. Its purpose is to record the text exactly as it was written. A copy of the Wikisource text can be made and edited elsewhere in the manner suggested above.

Units and measurements

All units and measurements are imperial as the text was written before British metrification.

Paragraph length

For reasons of cost and academic writing style, the paragraphs are rather long in length, making reading somewhat tiresome to modern eyes.

Authorities

At the end of some articles is a section called "Authorities." This is a record of all the sources used when writing the article. The reader may consider this the combination of today's Citations, References and Bibliography sections in modern reference texts.

Contributors

Contributors to articles are sometimes identified by their initials in parentheses at the end of the article. The initials may be linked to the "Author" page in Wikisource. A cross-reference of initials to author name is located at the end of each volume (e.g. Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Volume III/Table of contributors).

Work in progress

Some articles, although present, may be in a very unfinished state: images and diagrams may need to be included; tables may need to be formatted; the text may need formatting and proofreading, and may be incomplete. For transcriptions that are transclusions, a color bar at the upper left will indicate the condition of the article: yellow or green indicates the text has been proofread. For transcriptions that are not tranclusions, many times there is an indicator of text quality in the upper right. The indicator is a small cluster of squares. Three or four squares in the cluster indicates the text has been proofread. Just one square indicates the text is incomplete.