User:RM395/Course/Encyclopedia comparisons/MartellRedViper

Selection

I chose to do data caching. I have some previous knowledge of this subject and I was able to find it easily enough. I chose to use the Encyclopedia of Information Technology. Once I found that this existed I was sure that this would be an excellent resource, since I knew I wanted to do something computer related. Then it was just a matter of finding a specific enough topic to look at and that is when I found data cache.

Composition

The physical encyclopedia is actually much more in depth than the Wikipedia article. This caught me off guard at first because I always expect Wikipedia to have the most information. With the encyclopedia being so specific though it makes sense. It is also interesting to note that in the Wikipedia article I originally looked up Cache (computing) but it also has a "See Also" section where it lists a bunch of other articles related to caching. Each of the sections in caching also references a separate more in depth article. The in paper article was still 10 print pages, which is a considerable amount of information. Further delving into the related articles on Wikipedia though provides a very large amount of information and a side by side comparison, including the other Wikipedia articles on caching, would result in Wikipedia containing more information overall.

Imagery

The physical encyclopedia did have one image. The main caching article had 3 images and then each of the related, more specific caching articles also had a bunch of images. Overall Wikipedia provides more images and as the saying goes "A picture is worth a thousand words" when trying to figure out information quickly images are really helpful. They are also very useful when talking about something theoretical and helps you to wrap your mind around it.

Content

The actual title of the article for the physical encyclopedia is "Data Caching Patterns". This article focuses almost primarily web based caching. I find this interesting because I would say that while the web is a big emerging technology it is not the most fundamental of data caching. Wikipedia does have a section on web caching but it also has a section on CPU caching and disk caching along with others. I would consider CPU and disk caching to be the most fundamental and I am disappointing that they were not the focal point of the "Data Caching Patterns" article. The "Data Caching Patterns" article basically had us look at the different layers of caching. It then broke down and described all the different caching that can take place in each layer. At first I found this layout to be a bit confusing but after reading through everything thoroughly I wasn't as disappointed at the layout. The Wikipedia layout breaks it up into different sections based on the type of caching being done. It gives a brief summary and then a link to the full article. When you go to the full article those are further broken down into different sections (different for every article). I thought the ordering and grouping of articles on Wikipedia was much more intuitive than the groupings in the "Data Caching Patterns" article. Wikipedia also has the advantage of using bold, italics, and other text changes frequently. The physical article does bold for titles and such but overall most of the text is plain. I just find that bolding important words makes the text much easier to read, especially when you are skimming through for important information. The in print article does try to compete with this by having a list of important words at the end of the article along with their definitions. This is also a nice touch and if it weren't for being able to do cntrl + f on Wikipedia I would say that the printed article wins out in that respect. They both do have a special display for code, which I highly approve of. The Wikipedia articles takes better advantage of this though. The Wikipedia also includes examples, which I think really makes it go above and beyond in the content section. Examples, for me personally, are the best way to learn something quickly. Application is a very important part of getting something into your long term memory, an example helps to do this.

Sources

The print article has a total of 20 sources. I am actually familiar with a couple of these resources. They are mostly different API type resources that describe different programming languages. There are also a couple articles on best practices and designs. Since I know some of these resources already I can vouch for the quality of them. Quickly looking through the Wikipedia sources I am not finding any that I have seen before. They appear to be smaller articles versus the print article had well known Books/API's. I don't think that this is necessarily a bad thing but without looking through the articles I can't vouch for the quality of them. I guess in this sense I would say that the print article would be the better of the two. It used fairly well known books/API's in the computer science world so anyone with some knowledge would be able to respect where the knowledge is coming from. That isn't to say that the Wikipedia information is inaccurate, which it is not from what I have seen, but just that the sources aren't as well known, at least to me.

Overall

Wikipedia won out on overall composition. Wikipedia provided much more information and most of it seemed accurate.
Wikipedia won out on imagery. Wikipedia, in my experience, has always had great images for articles and this article was no exception.
Wikipedia won out on overall content. Wikipedia provided an easier to read format in my opinion. They also made the information easier to read and understand. Print Encyclopedia won out on sources. The print encyclopedia used bigger name articles and for that I gave it to them over Wikipedia.

Overall winner: Wikipedia--MartellRedViper (talk) 04:25, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
Wikipedia just provided a lot more in what I look for in an encyclopedia. I want information fast when I got to an encyclopedia and I was not getting that from the print article. I would have had to read basically everything there to really understand it. With Wikipedia I could just go straight to one of the nice sections, or read the example, or look at the images and I would put up the information much more quickly.