This is a feature not a bug: encyclopedia articles are breadth-first introductions to topics. If you are just mildly curious about something you'll probably get what you need. If you want to know more you'll have a view of the "landscape" and so will probably understand a more specialized book better -- and even be better at finding the right specialized book in the library.
That did not provide me with in-depth knowledge about anything, but even today I have a wide general knowledge, and I am interested in many subjects, some very obscure, which I credit to that encyclopedia.
More importantly, the encyclopedia gave me an overview of human knowledge and helped me to figure out what I was most interested in. The articles about radio, radar, computers and such always fascinated me and, I think, steered me into a career in engineering.
We had the WorldBooks, but ran across Encyclopedia Britannica in the school libraries. The Macropaedia was _far_ more in depth than the Micropeadia, or WorldBook at its best.
Me too. And it taught me a skill that I think was the key to my professional success: learning how apparently unrelated things can give you the key to solving problems or understanding things that are important to you.
Much the same as wikipedia and similar.
But, like wikipedia, they were sometimes useful starting points with those short articles hopefully giving you a keyword or two, or a reference to other articles in the encyclopedia itself, so you had something useful to search the rest of the library (by hand or by asking the original intelligent search algorithm: a friendly librarian!) for fuller texts about.
Also as a child I remember just randomly skipping to a page and finding some interesting fact, then following the references to elsewhere. I could spend hours learning random things I'd never actually need to know that way!
Same as the Web. My experience has been that more often than not I hit "buy/pirate a book" surprisingly quickly when I start to dig past what's on Wikipedia, which is often not that much. Usually something from a university press.
I think that in one of Woody Allen films a character complains about a restaurant that "the food is terrible and the portions are too small"
Why not?
All of the above is explained in this article[1] (I just lazily searched for one).
Sources: 1: https://crk.umn.edu/library/primary-secondary-and-tertiary-s...
As an adult, encyclopedias are a great starting point, but cannot do anything more than scratch the surface of any subject they cover.
That's just the way it is, I think.
The key advantage that printed encyclopedias have over Wikipedia is that the experts writing the articles are chosen by editors and have to be able to demonstrate broad and authoritative knowledge of the subject, before they're allowed to put those words on paper. Not so with Wikipedia.
I do remember that there was an exception for the Encyclopedia Britannica, which could be used as a source as long as it wasn't the only source. For some reason it was considered more scholarly than other encyclopedias.