Wikipedia's Accuracy Compared to Britannica

Raul654 writes "Nature magazine recently conducted a head-to-head competition between Wikipedia and Britannica, having experts compare 42 science-related articles. The result was that Wikipedia had about 4 errors per article, while Britannica had about 3. However, a pair of endevouring Wikipedians dug a little deeper and discovered that the Wikipedia articles in the sample were, on average, 2.6 times longer than Britannica's - meaning Wikipedia has an error rate far less than Britannica's." Interesting, considering some past claims. Story available on the BBC as well.

Comments

Dooop

[MullerMn]

Slashdot Article Compared to Earlier Slashback: Found To Be Identical

Story available here.

Re:Dooop

[Prospero's Grue]

Slashdot Article Compared to Earlier Slashback: Found To Be Identical

Yeah, but the Slashdot Article is 1.4 times longer, so it's not as duped as you think...

Re:Dooop

[Anonymous Coward]

Please it took like me 2 seconds to find slander on Wikipedia...

Here this was up just yesterday and was just taken takendown. YES it was up on the web for a while before being noticed. I think the point is it should not have been up AT ALL. There is nothing inpressive in how long or how fast something slanderous and stupid was caught. Without Wiki it WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN UP AT ALL.

Under the rock group Dokken.

In 2005, Don Dokken and Jani Lane of a band called Warrant participated in a civil union ceremony to declare their love for one another.

Yeah yeah its funny and you can lie and Ad Hom away but this is what people see. No matter how much /dotters shout them down and browbeat them.

Other Encyclopedias don't have problems, anywhere even remotely close to Wiki with its slander and information athentication WARS.

I know, on dense heads and deaf ears. Wasting my time..

Re:Dooop

[ceejayoz]

Here this was up just yesterday and was just taken takendown.

So you left slander up on the Internet when you could easily have removed it? You're part of the problem!

Without Wiki it WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN UP AT ALL.

And neither would much of the useful content.

Other Encyclopedias don't have problems, anywhere even remotely close to Wiki with its slander and information athentication WARS.

Other encyclopedias don't have much of the more obscure information available in Wikipedia.

Re:Dooop

[Patik]

There is nothing inpressive in how long or how fast something slanderous and stupid was caught. Without Wiki it WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN UP AT ALL.

If you had a system where changes and additions had to be approved by other users before being applied to an article you would still get slander but in a different form -- slanderous people and trolls would simply watch the "waiting for approval" list and deny legitimate submissions while allowing their troll friends' slanderous submissions. Plus you'd have to worry about people making changes to an article that will be very different once a previously-made change gets approval, which would cause quite a headache.

Re:Dooop

[timster]

When I was in junior high, people used to slip pages from porn into the encyclopedia volumes in the school library. An annoyance to be sure, but until our society gains the sense to lock teenagers up in solitary confinement, we will still encounter stupid pranks from time to time.

Re:Dooop

[Anonymous Coward]

Under the rock group Dokken.

In 2005, Don Dokken and Jani Lane of a band called Warrant participated in a civil union ceremony to declare their love for one another.

Yeah yeah its funny and you can lie and Ad Hom away but this is what people see. No matter how much /dotters shout them down and browbeat them.

You bastard. I wrote my graduate thesis on Don Dokken and quoted that article as a source.

Re:Dooop

[oleksaa]

I think you just gotta keep the fact that wikipedia is written by other people in mind when you are doing research. It is still a valuable tool. It may not always provide a complete account of a subject but usually gives a good overview and at the very least provides you with some common terminology related to the subject. I'm a CS grad. student and I use Wikipedia as a starting point for my research all the time. If i'm not at all familiar with a subject, I go there, get some keywords, and then use those to look around on the internet(usually google scholar, which is freakin awesome). Therefore, I think Wikipedia should never be used as a sole reference. Then again, if all of your information comes from any one place you're in trouble so that shouldn't be a surprise.

Re:Dooop

[Anonymous Coward]

I just took that erroneous information and made a website out of it. Without HTTP that information would not have been posted at all. DOWN WITH HTTP!

/blah

Re:Dooop

[onemorechip]

What's more unsettling is that somebody cared enough about Dokken to put up an article about them in the first place.

P.S. This is nitpicking, but that statement wouldn't come under the heading of slander, it would come under libel (assuming it meets the legal tests for that, which you and I don't have the factual information to determine).

dupe epud dupe

[Speare]

Story available still on the front page of Slashdot as well.

Some days I would like to see the "editors" of this site strapped down Clockwork-Orange-style, forced to read their own stories before accepting new versions of the same old stuff.

Re:dupe epud dupe

[pembo13]

Ah, you liked Clockwork Orange too did you?

Re:dupe epud dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hilarious to mod a "dupe" complaint down as redundant. If only we could mod the original stories that way.

Re:dupe epud dupe

[TheRaven64]

I appreciate the dupe, since I didn't see it the first time. I've blocked SkuttleMonkey because of the whole * * Beatles Beatles thing, and it looks like the other editors have as well...

Not exactly

[bersl2]

However, a pair of endevouring Wikipedians dug a little deeper and discovered that the Wikipedia articles in the sample were, on average, 2.6 times longer than Britannica's - meaning Wikipedia has an error rate far less than Britannica's.

That part's new.

Re:Not exactly

[irote]

And it's also nonsense. The Wikipedia article is written flabbily, by a collection of authors, some experts, some not, some good writers, some terrible ones.

The Britannica, on the other hand, is written by someone with clear credentials as an expert, to a word limit, and is then edited for conciseness and clarity. That is to say, the Britannica piece will undoubtedly say more than the Wikipedia piece. The error per word rate in Britannica may be higher, but the error per fact rate is probably much more favourable to Britannica.

Easy example - compare the writing in a mainstream newspaper to a well-written one with tight editorial policies, like the Financial Times or the Economist. Your average Sidney Morning Herald, Guardian or San Francisco Chroncile article is probably longer, but it says less.

Re:Not exactly

[grasshoppa]

While what you say may be true, it's smoke screen to the issue. The quality of writing is not what's being examined, short of accurancy.

To that end, the results are still valid: Wikipedia has fewer errors per content unit.

Re:Not exactly

[croddy]

So, what you're saying is that Britannica has a long way to go before it will be useful as a wiki?

Re:Not exactly

[Jugalator]

The Wikipedia article is written flabbily, by a collection of authors, some experts, some not, some good writers, some terrible ones.

Yes, and terrible contributions gets edited over time as the article stabilizes.

The error per word rate in Britannica may be higher, but the error per fact rate is probably much more favourable to Britannica.

So you have no idea or basis for this claim?

Easy example - compare the writing in a mainstream newspaper to a well-written one with tight editorial policies, like the Financial Times or the Economist. Your average Sidney Morning Herald, Guardian or San Francisco Chroncile article is probably longer, but it says less.

I don't know about you, but from the articles I've seen on Wikipedia, they've been quite rich in information.

Re:Not exactly

[irote]

What's the content unit? The fact or the word?

As you say, the quality of writing is not what's being examined. We turn to an encyclopedia, whether printed or online, for facts.

For this reason, it's the accuracy of these facts that is of interest to us.

Accept the (indubitably true) proposition that the fact-to-word ratio in Britannica is higher than in Wikipedia, then the submitter's 'argument' is false: dividing the length of an article by the number of errors in it does not give you an average error rate.

A word is neither true nor false, a statement can be.

Re:Not exactly

[tomjen]

A word is neither true nor false

I know to that are.

Re:Not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

The error per word rate in Britannica may be higher, but the error per fact rate is probably much more favourable to Britannica.

So you have no idea or basis for this claim?

He read it in Wikipedia, right after he wrote it.

Re:Not exactly

[chundo]

New, but not neccesarily accurate. As it says at the top of the page in the second link:

All entries were chosen to be approximately the same length in both encyclopaedias. In a small number of cases some material, such as reference lists, was removed to make the lengths of the entries more similar.

Without actual links to the articles in question, I'd tend to believe Nature's assertion rather than "a pair of endeavoring wikipedians".

Re:Not exactly

[irote]

I agree, they can be rich in information, no argument at all. I frequently use it as a resource.

My quibble is with the submitter's argument that the error per word ratio in Wikipedia is lower than in Britannica. I say this is meaningless: we're interested in the error per statement ratio.

Re:Not exactly

[CastrTroy]

Yeah, but you're paying for britannica. I'd really expect them to have less than 3 errors per article. Wikipedia is a free enclopedia by the people, for the people. It will get better if the community gets bigger. There's a lot of stuff you'll find in wikipedia that you won't find in britannica, because people can write about whatever they want.

Re:Not exactly

[QuietLagoon]

It will get better if the community gets bigger.

The implication is that the additional people who join the community will be better than those that are already in it. What if those who make the community larger are more error-prone than those who are already in the community?

people can write about whatever they want.

Even things they think they know something about.

Re:Not exactly

[iabervon]

That is to say, the Britannica piece will undoubtedly say more than the Wikipedia piece.

That's not actually true. Wikipedia's threshold for relevance is lower, so the articles say more, in addition to being less densely written. This is due, to a large extent, because Britannica has to print theirs, so they have pressure to keep things brief, whereas Wikipedia can go into lots of detail. I don't have access to Britannica, but I'm willing to bet that it doesn't explain the Reed-Solomon configuration for error correction on CDs. So chances as that Wikipedia articles have more information in them, although not by as big a factor as the increase in size. Of course, there's no way for us to know at this point the characteristics of the articles that Nature used for this comparison, because they seem to have merged related articles in both cases. For example, most of the content of the Wikipedia "Field Effect Transistor" is in the articles on particular types (MOSFET, JFET, etc.), and the article on Woodward in Britannica must have gotten sections from other articles (e.g., overviews of things he worked on) pulled in if Nature compared versions of remotely similar lengths or scope, since Britannica doesn't break up this topic into articles the same way.

Re:Not exactly

[Eccles]

Sometimes it takes longer to write tersely than meanderingly.

I took a look at a Wikipedia article on Battleships that, long ago, I had contributed to. (There are still sentences that I wrote mixed in.) But there are bits like:
"The German High Seas Fleet and the British Grand Fleet were too valuable to be risked in battle and so both spent the majority of the war in port, waiting to respond should the other go to sea. Paradoxically, the ships were too valuable (strategically, at least) to leave at port, and too expensive to use in battle."

Re:Not exactly

[pizzaman100]

Yeah, but you're paying for britannica. I'd really expect them to have less than 3 errors per article.

Note that study only picked 42 science articles. This does not mean that britannica has that rate of errors for other diciplines.

Re:Not exactly

[nietsch]

That is something to do with logistics, as they probably had easier acces to examiners in those topics than in say -robotic porn animation.
You have no indication weather the error rate in other topics than the on e tested is higher or lower.

Re:Not exactly

[Haeleth]

Note that study only picked 42 science articles. This does not mean that britannica has that rate of errors for other diciplines.

Note also that science is one of the few disciplines in which, by and large, there tends only to be one current scientific theory which is clearly stated and can easily be summarised encyclopedically. It is much, much, much easier to write a good article on the quark than on Hamlet.

And as you'd expect, Wikipedia's article on Hamlet is not very good. On the positive side, I can actually read it - unlike the Britannica article, which it seems you have to pay for. (They did let me read the first paragraph; it starts by presenting a contested theory as though it were an undisputable fact, an unimpressive opening that does not encourage me to part with $69.95 to see the rest.)

Re:Not exactly

[maxwell demon]

Well, the very link you gave contaqins a list of all articles compared. If you don't know how to make a link from the name of a Wikipedia article, just use the Wikipedia search function.

Re:Not exactly

[zxnos]

so if i write an incorrect statement that is 2.6 times longer than britannica's statement i am more accurate?

Re:Not exactly

[Haeleth]

Accept the (indubitably true) proposition

Your use of language is as careless as that you attribute to Wikipedia's editors. No proposition is "indubitably true", and no proposition can be proven by asserting its truth without providing any sort of argument to support the assertion.

It is plausible that Britannica presents facts more concisely. It is even likely. But unless someone actually

• Defines a "fact", in the context of an encyclopedia article, in an objective and measurable way;
• Devises a methodology for assessing the ratio of facts (thus defined) to words;
• Applies this methodology to a statistically significant selection of articles from Wikipedia;
• Applies the same methodology to a comparable set of articles from Britannica; and
• Publishes their definitions, methodology, and results,

then you simply can not describe the proposition as "true". And even if such a study existed, you would have to be pretty damn sure that its methodology was unassailable before you could consider describing the proposition it supported as "indubitably true".

Re:Not exactly

[EpsCylonB]

They should compare only articles of a certain age in wikipedia with the brittanica articles, and myabe wikipedia should warn if an article is either new or been hardly accessed.

Re:Not exactly

[flyingsquid]

I don't know about you, but from the articles I've seen on Wikipedia, they've been quite rich in information.

Of course, there's the issue of the type of information. Wikipedia has a dissertation-length discussions of Half-Life 2 and Babylon 5, for instance, and a meager couple screens devoted to Moby Dick (unless you count the discussions of Moby Dick's influences in Star Trek episodes, Japanese video games and comic books as a serious discussion of the novel).

Though I suppose you could make the argument that this is actually a strength rather than a weakness. Moby Dick may be a masterwork of American fiction, but today, video games and sci-fi soap operas have a vastly greater cultural influence than Herman Melville.

Re:Not exactly

[pingveno]

You forgot another difference in Wikipedia as compared to Britannica. Wikipedia has a large amount of stubs, the articles or sections of articles that don't go into enough detail on a subject. I'm pretty sure Britannica requires all articles to not just be clear and concise, but also to be complete. Though Wikipedia has a system for tracking stubs, there are still many articles in the wiki that won't be completed because no one has interest or knowledge in the subject.

Re:Not exactly

[fbjon]

It really seems that Wikipedia is an good encyclopedia of things that actually matter to most people.

Re:Not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia's threshold for relevance is lower, so the articles say more, in addition to being less densely written.

To me, it seems more like the criteria for relevance differ significantly between Brittanica and Wikipedia. I would argue this is Wikipedia's major weakness, especially in its scientific and technical sections. The primary purpose of a general encyclopedia should be to convey the essential meaning of a topic to an intelligent nonexpert, something which a large fraction of articles on Wikipedia completely fails to do. You can see this most clearly in the opening paragraphs of an article. The linked article is a case in point; the level of jargon present from the first sentence renders the article useless to the lay reader without a technical education. This is not to say that I find the article poorly written. In fact, it seems to be on par with those found in a technical encyclopedia. Nor do I believe that the article should necessarily be shortened: this ability to go to great detail is, as is often mentioned, a unique strength of Wikipedia's approach. Unfortunately, detail is often priveliged over clarity; an article which can't be reduced to a stub can't stand on its own, no matter how detailed it is.

Re:Not exactly

[westlake]

I don't have access to Britannica, but I'm willing to bet that it doesn't explain the Reed-Solomon configuration for error correction on CDs

For two hundred and thirty-five years, the Britannica's target audience had been well-educated readers with interests outside their immediate experience or profession. The encyclopedia has never claimed to meet the needs of a surgeon, a lawyer, or an engineer in his own specialty.

Re:Not exactly

[lgw]

And that's the most consice statement *about* Wikipedia I've yet seen. It's not full of facts that people think should be taught, but full of facts that people want to know. Imagine that.

Re:Not exactly

[bani]

The main difference here is that the experts consulted in the study can correct the wikipedia errors themselves, reducing the errors in those articles to zero. There is no way they can correct the britannica errors.

The differences go way beyond just "tight editorial policies". The difference in content is enormous. Compare Britannica's entry on C (programming language) versus the entry in Wikipedia.

Re:Not exactly

[raoul666]

Look up Moby Dick in the Britannica, you won't see more than a "meager couple screens". Well, the paper equivalent, anyway. And, as it happens, the article in question is actually pretty decent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby_Dick

But your point is a good one. Wikipedia focuses a lot on what is popular, especially what is popular to the kind of people who write articles, who all, at the very least, have access to the internet. As a result...well, it'd nerd heavy. But I think that'll change. The more popular it gets, the more english profs will start writing, and the better articles about literature will become. And the same for other fields, of course.

Re:Not exactly

[kaitou]

I almost agree with you, but I would replace "most people" with "its' target demographic." After all most people don't really know about wikipedia, although it is getting more exposure through all the articles The Register has been writing about it.

(what's that saying about all publicity being good publicity again?)

Re:Not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

The main difference here is that the experts consulted in the study can correct the wikipedia errors themselves, reducing the errors in those articles to zero.

That's irrelevant if they don't, and you can be almost certain that they won't. The wikipedia folks are asking for the errors, and that's good. But it doesn't fix the larger problem that, when everyone can edit articles on an equal footing there's something of a ceiling on how accurate something can get (since idiots can introduce errors more easily than experts can fix them on account of there being, by definition [almost], more idiots than experts).

Re:Not exactly

[timeOday]

Accept the (indubitably true) proposition that the fact-to-word ratio in Britannica is higher than in Wikipedia

Ha. Had the people who think that's indubitably true been asked about "errors per article" before this study was done, they indubitably would have bet on a clear victory for Britannica. That's what I think.

Re:Not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

"[Britannica] has never claimed to meet the needs of a surgeon, a lawyer, or an engineer in his own specialty"

Wikipedia does. Tell me again why lackage is a benefit?

Re:Not exactly

[jdavidb]

I count five screens of information, not counting the "Selected adaptations and references" section, which certainly references more than Star Trek. Meanwhile, I went searching on britannica.com and found that there was no article at all on Moby Dick. There was an article on Herman Melville, though. It's 2845 words long. I admit that beats Wikipedia's, which is 883 not counting the bibliography. But combined with the text of the Moby Dick entry, that's 2672 words total, again not counting the (not just Star Trek) references section.

Re:Not exactly

[Old Wolf]

It'd be hard to write something worse than the Wikipedia article on C.

I don't have a Britannica membership so I can't read its full entry on C.

What point are you trying to make?

Re:Not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

Possibly. If a Britannica statement of 10 words contains a factual error, and you add 16 qualifying words that partially mitigate that error, then you have done exactly what you said.

Of course, if the original statement was error-free, then what you said is not possible.

Re:Not exactly

[nwbvt]

"Your use of language is as careless as that you attribute to Wikipedia's editors. No proposition is "indubitably true", and no proposition can be proven by asserting its truth without providing any sort of argument to support the assertion."

Obviously that statement was being used as a literary device to say that it is fairly obvious to most readers that encyclopedias like Britannica are more concise than the Wikipedia. Obviously he wasn't trying to write a mathematical proof (in fact when you consider the very definition of indubitably, "Too apparent to be doubted; unquestionable", that becomes even more obvious). Thats ok because he was discussing an encyclopedia, not writing a paper on number theory.

This is why you need to understand the context behind statements before you can evaluate them.

Re:Not exactly

[evilbessie]

Well, if you need useful results that you can TRUST then ANY encylopedia is not going to be enough. They are a tool for finding out where you should then investigate further.

If you want to be accurate you should always check your facts from several sources. ANY tome can be wrong, so check one against another; if it really matters that much to you. It'll give you a best guess, but nothing further, yes it SHOULD be accurate and it's nice to know that it is quite accurate compared with an established source of reference. But really if you want to be sure of what you are saying check the facts with something else to be sure.

Re:Not exactly

[blackmagic1982]

This is all based on the assumption that there are loads of idiots out there that will randomly decide to edit articles of which they have no knowledge. True, this becomes a problem with more derisive subjects, but for, say, an article on the history of string theory or the description of last week's episode of Battlestar Galactica, why would a person who has no real knowledge of the subject go on this article in the first place...let alone be compelled to edit it? What is interesting about the wikipedia debate is that it goes into the how we view humanity as a collective body in general. Are most people idiots or experts? What qualifies someone as an expert? What is a bias? How does even introducing the concept of expert effect the dissemination and censorship of information? Debate is all well and good, but when it comes down to it, no one can prove all people (excluding you, dear /.er) are stupid, evil idiots and no one can prove that all people are intelligent, reasonable individuals. Besides, even now in our modern goggled age, school textbooks are riddled with errors, present vastly different views of histories depending on the region (even within a single country) and no one seems to mind or question. Wikipedia, even at it's worst, at least acknowledges the subjective of the idea of truth and expertise itself. And furthermore, unlike authoritative texts, it allows the reader to be an active participant and invites debate. Imagine the possibilities of a school system where all the students where encourage to help create the textbooks themselves instead of memorizing facts they assume are true without any thought? Of course this all IMHO. Because hell, I don't really know if wikipedia exists at all.

Re:Not exactly

[westlake]

"[Britannica] has never claimed to meet the needs of a surgeon, a lawyer, or an engineer in his own specialty"
Wikipedia does. Tell me again why lackage is a benefit?

The Brittanica's purpose is to make the broad range of human knowledge accessible to the intelligent general reader, ideally, through vigorous and uniquely personal essays by men and women of extraordinary accomplishment, an Einstein or a Freud. .

Re:Not exactly

[rtb61]

Well, it would be more accurate to say that wikepdia is full of facts that people want to share.

Re:Not exactly

[fuctupteeth]

I have to say, with all of this execellent grammer and proper spelling by so many objective experts, this conversation should be submitted to Wikipedia as an example of a pointless agrument. Words and facts can be exploited the same way as running a red light- you can get where your going without carring what the consequences are, much like this paragraph...

More words == lower error rate?

[aborchers]

So if I go to Wikipedia and type the word "gibblefinch" a few thousand times into an article, I can reduce its error rate?

Re:More words == lower error rate?

[ThosLives]

Indeed. I think people need some education on how to establish proper metrics. There seems to be a misconception that just having metrics is sufficient. The significance and meaning behind most new metrics seems to be missing.

Re:More words == lower error rate?

[aborchers]

"Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forty percent of all people know that." -- Homer Simpson

Re:More words == lower error rate?

[Phreakiture]

So if I go to Wikipedia and type the word "gibblefinch" a few thousand times into an article, I can reduce its error rate?

Only if that is what the article should say, and saying so is useful to someone looking up whatever topic it is you are looking up and finding the aforementioned gibblefinch storm. If, on the other hand, it is not useful or relevant, then not, it would tend to increase the error rate, or at lease lower the signal to noise ratio, rather greatly.

Re:More words == lower error rate?

[michelcultivo]

No, but the community need to check if the article is correct and if there is any mistake about the subject. Slashdot works very well this way (forget the CowboyNeal mistakes and errors).

Re:More words == lower error rate?

[PhoenixK7]

OK. I can agree with this on one level, however these are a select number of articles that have been reviewed for inaccuracies. Presumably they don’t contain “gibblefinch”; repeated 5000 times to increase article length. What is indicated here is that per kilobyte (as a metric for length) there are fewer errors. Being more lengthy does not necessarily mean there’s really more information contained on the page, but given the gross difference in article length I’d hazzard a guess that the wikipedia articles don’t simply contain a bunch of fluff to make them look longer, they probably actually have more content.

To settle this issue, the metric should not be inaccuracies per kilobyte, but inaccuracies per idea/concept/fact or whatever, but those statistics are a little more of a pain to collect :-)

Re:More words == lower error rate?

[PhoenixK7]

Bleh, so slashdot doesn't like the character codes. /me adds "*slashdot.org*" to sites for greasemonkey smart firefox script to exclude :-P

Re:More words == lower error rate?

[Captain Hook]

I think the point here is that if the article is longer, it could

a) go into the main topic in more detail
b) cover more related topics

Since these sorts of reference sources tend to be used as a first point of contact for a new topic, surely having more infomation (especially information that can lead to more background reading) in one place is useful and the benefit of that could potentially offset 1 extra factual inaccuracy.

Re:More words == lower error rate?

[CMiYC]

Bleh. /me adds "PhoenixK7" to the list of people who should hit "preview" first.

Re:More words == lower error rate?

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that the character codes showed up means that you were using the wrong symbol. If you use a regular ASCII 39, you get an apostrophe like this '. No HTML entities needed.

Re:More words == lower error rate?

[jahudabudy]

I think the point here is that if the article is longer, it could

a) go into the main topic in more detail
b) cover more related topics

Very true. It could. I believe aborcher's point (with which I agree) is that longer doesn't necessarily mean it does, so this particular metric is useless.

Re:More words == lower error rate?

[hal2814]

"I think the point here is that if the article is longer, it could
a) go into the main topic in more detail
b) cover more related topics"

But that's not always the case. Sometimes things are just wordier and don't cover any new material. They could just be using more words to make the same point. You know, like when you pad out a one-sentence thought into an entire paragraph. That sort of thing happens because the number of words is not indicitive of the amount of content.

The Wikipedia and Brittanica comparisons should compare information found only in both sources for accuracy. Also, counting errors per entry doesn't give us a good idea of how accurate the articles are. Some errors are far more misleading than others. For example, being a year of on when something was discovered might be a minor error compared to something inherently wrong with the subject of the entry.

Re:More words == lower error rate?

[Desult]

Yeah, sure, it could, but it could be that that Wikipedians don't have editors or word limits.

e.g.

Genghis Khan was reportedly irritable; he murdered his family after a lunchtime interruption. (13 words)

vs.

Ghenghis Khan was known to be highly grumpy and quick to anger, and because of this, he decided to make the move to murder his family when they interrupted his lunch. (31 words)

Example 2 is 2.4 times longer than example 1. They contain basically the same information. The second has no more real informational value than the first, and THAT'S the point.

The only (potentially) useful metric is error per unit of information. Word and/or KB is a laughable substitute for unit of information. One error in one fact is 100% error rate. If my paragraph is 100 words long and contains one fact and one factual error, my error rate is still 100%.

I might even agree with you that "reference" might be worth half a "fact" or something, but simply saying "More words = more facts and more external references!" is totally and obviously wrong. Even if it IS true with Wikipedia, that doesn't mean that LESS words mean LESS referential or factual material in EB (they may use "see also:" for instance).

Re:More words == lower error rate?

[hackstraw]

So if I go to Wikipedia and type the word "gibblefinch" a few thousand times into an article, I can reduce its error rate?

No, you need to spell it correctly to increase the accuracy.

Fsckin nubes.

Re:More words == lower error rate?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, because I would presume that each "gibblefinch" you type in would be considered an error, and if you DO type in "gibblefinch" a few thousand times, that would shoot the error rate up to a few hundred per article.

Re:More words == lower error rate?

[tepples]

If you use a regular ASCII 39

I think the point is that when the user presses the key that otherwise produces ASCII 39, a Firefox extension translates it into one of the "smart quotes" that just about every site but Slashdot accepts nowadays. In addition, some sites actually accept a different set of characters in the preview and submit modes.

Re:More words == lower error rate?

[TeXMaster]

If I write an article with a certain number of errors, and the rewrite the same article with the exact same conceptual content, but in a much more verbose manner, the article hasn't improved: it's still as right (or wrong) as the short version was. If the errors are conceptual or factual, the total length of the article is absolutely irrelevant. The only thing that is important is the number of concepts or facts expressed, and how many of them are right. So unless the additional length introduces more facts, more examples and similar (and is therefore 'valuable' additional content, and not just verbose verbiage) the length of the articles is not significant.

The only case in which error/length ratio is meaningful is when you are only considering grammar or typographical mistakes: badly formed phrases, missing or additional or misplaced letters, dates with inverted numbers, and so on and so forth.

Note how this post is rather verbose. I could come up with a much longer or a much shorter one, with the same content, and I would still be equally wrong (or right).

Re:More words == lower error rate?

[drsquare]

Are you saying that wikipedia's articles are padded out by irrelevent information? Personally I can't think of anything more useful than a paragraph at the bottom of the page telling me when something was mentioned in a Star Trek episode.

Seriously though, not all errors are equal. A decimal number out by 0.0001 is different than some vandal inserting a completely bogus fact just to trick people. I don't think that Britannia's errors are in any way as bad as the obscene vandalism that affects many wikipedia articles.

Re:More words == lower error rate?

[ceejayoz]

Your point re: editors cutting down wordiness is a valid one, but the opposite applies as well - Wikipedia's lack of length restraints likely permits more detail in many cases. You might find out what made him irritable, how he killed them, what the repercussions across the kingdom were, etc., when such things are too minor for Britannica to use paper on.

Re:More words == lower error rate?

[ceejayoz]

I don't think that Britannia's errors are in any way as bad as the obscene vandalism that affects many wikipedia articles.

Which one are you more likely to take as fact without questioning - that the speed of light is 295,792,458 metres per second, or that George Bush sucks Dick Cheney's cock nightly before his bedtime story?

Subtle errors are far more dangerous than outright vandalism.

Re:More words == lower error rate?

[bill_kress]

I suggest you give it a try and check back in 5 minutes and see if it changed the error rate--or anything at all.

Re:More words == lower error rate?

[DrStrange66]

Only if that is what the article should say, and saying so is useful to someone looking up whatever topic it is you are looking up and finding the aforementioned gibblefinch storm. If, on the other hand, it is not useful or relevant, then not, it would tend to increase the error rate, or at lease lower the signal to noise ratio, rather greatly.

Perhaps then someone should setup a Kalman filter to decide if a combination of the various encyclopedias entries would be more accurate or if the entry from one of the individual sources is more accurate than the combination of them.

Note: I didn't find a good entry in http://www.britannica.com/ on the Kalman Filter.

Re:More words == lower error rate?

[aborchers]

"Are you saying that wikipedia's articles are padded out by irrelevent information?"

Nope, just that the conclusion of the article summary is hardly justified on its face.

Re:More words == lower error rate?

[is as us Infinite]

Totally OT!

Your sig should read:

"In Soviet Russia: 3. Profit! 2. ... 1. Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of Insensitive Clod overlords bowing to their subjects!"

(:

Re:More words == lower error rate?

[aborchers]

You so should have gotten +5 funny for this. Noone else even seems to have got the joke.

BTW, how do you spell it?

Careful with stats...

[erick99]

I am not sure that it is reasonable to consider error rate primarily as errors per unit of text. In that case, one could write a submission and then insert a lot of fluff to lower the "error rate." I would consider the absolute amount of errors per submission at least as important as the quantity of errors as a function of quantity of text. Just a thought.

Re:Careful with stats...

[sarlos]

Actually, since Wikipedia is open to editing by anyone, the next person to come along can simply revise what you wrote to remove the needless fluff. That is one of the many benefits to having a community edited and modified database such as Wikipedia.

Re:Careful with stats...

[Anonymous Coward]

Number of errors per article isn't that meaningfull of a measure either. What type of errors? Does one have a spelling error while the other says a whale is a fish?

Re:Careful with stats...

[cowboy76Spain]

The ideal metric should be errors / information (in bits)... the trouble is that it is difficult to find out how to measure the bits of information in an article (do not confuse this measure with the number of characters in the article).

My guess is that professional editors are more used to a direct approach to the subject of the article, thus making it shorter but more information dense, so I do not find this a good measure of wikipedia reliability. In fact, this "smaller size" should be considered as being more "user friendly" that an article too long and that does not conform only to the matter of the article.

Re:Careful with stats...

[SComps]

they could also delete pretty much all the facts and replace it with gibblefinch a few thousand times. In that case, if there were absolutely no facts whatsoever, would it be considered 100% factual because there was a 0% error rate?

Re:Careful with stats...

[shaitand]

We can safely assume the "experts" had moral concerns. Therefore they have corrected all the wikipedia errors leaving ZERO per article. Britanica on the other hand still has 3 per article.

Although, a difference of 1 error per article in lengthy science articles is not substantial enough to pass the margin of error of the experts themselves.

Re:Careful with stats...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why be careful? With a sample set of 42, I'm sure that's an accurate reflection of the entire wealth of knowledge from both sources...

Re:Careful with stats...

[HTL2001]

I would propose then, to measure the ratio of acurate info to inacurate info.

now we just have to say what qualifies as a unit of acurate information

Re:Careful with stats...

[Moofie]

Let's start with spelling "accurate" right.

Re:Careful with stats...

[sydb]

It's OK, they both have whales down as mammals.

Re:Careful with stats...

[julesh]

We can safely assume the "experts" had moral concerns. Therefore they have corrected all the wikipedia errors leaving ZERO per article. Britanica on the other hand still has 3 per article.

It doesn't seem as though they have, no. This may be to do with the fact that they weren't told where the articles they were reviewing had come from.

Accuracy

[penguinoid]

Wikipedia has less errors, you say? We'll be fixing that shortly...
-- The Britanica Team

Re:Accuracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia has less errors, you say? We'll be fixing that shortly...

fewer errors

- Grammar Nazi Team

Re:Accuracy

[LiquidCoooled]

Don't you mean 'Britannica'?

Sincerely,
A Wiki editor.

ps, we don't hold grudges and most of us will gladly help clean up your mistakes :)

Re:Accuracy

[colinbrash]

Wikipedia has less errors, you say? We'll be fixing that shortly...
-- The Britanica Team

Modded as "Funny," but this is actually very insightful. The problem (and advantage) of Wikipedia is its volatility. Anyone can go change something to be incorrect (whether maliciously or not), at any time.

This study, unfortunately, tells us almost nothing. The average number of errors per entry is really not a valuable statistic. How bad were the errors? How long are the errors there? Wikipedia, because of its volatility, really cannot be instanced in the way this study has done. It would be more revealing to do a study of the past X months/years/whatever, to determine how many errors there were, what kind of errors there were, and how long these errors were around.

Of course, then the Encyclopedia Britannica wouldn't be studied as *it* should. Because it is *not* such a volatile resource. In reality, the two resources are not as similar as people think.

And regarding the average number of errors per length of text: this statistic is downright worthless. If someone states something incorrect in one sentence, how is it any better to state the same incorrect thing in 10 sentences?

Re:Accuracy

[allanj37]

Oh, so you mean you'll be taking out the errors from Britannica, huh? :)

Re:Accuracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you my good [wo]man, that's one of my pet peeves. Countable vs. uncountable errors.

Re:Accuracy

[Anonymous Coward]

The reals are well ordered!

Re:Accuracy

[Anonymous Coward]

And don't you mean "fewer errors?"

Sincerely,
A Grammar Nazi

Re:Accuracy

[Viper Daimao]

...unless your article has anything to do with any political or controversial subject.

Sincerley,
A Wiki Reader

Re:Accuracy

[TallGuyRacer]

What? The Wikipedia has errors? We'll be fixing that shortly...

A Wiki editor.

Re:Accuracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean "fewer", not "less"?

Wikipedia

[totallygeek]

Wikipedia is an excellent knowledge repository. Once you get what you came for there, you can better research what you are working on. There are just too many topics where a difference of opinion or perspective would be considered error or truth. I have yet to find a more comprehensive and accurate source of information though...

Re:Wikipedia

[Ryan Amos]

Wikipedia is an excellent knowledge repository about subjects that a resonable amount of people give a damn about. The recent flap with Wikipedia was not so much a failure on their part, but simply a fake article about an obscure subject that not a whole lot of people would even know is wrong in order to correct.

I would not trust Wikipedia on obscure subjects. These subjects get less "eye traffic" and thus less people funneled to correct them, and by nature of their obscurity, less people qualified to correct them in the first place.

In any case, most college courses explicitly ban use of Wikipedia as a reference. It's just too easy to change an entry and add wrong information so all your classmates do poorly.

Re:Wikipedia

[croddy]

Most college courses explicitly ban use of any encyclopedia as a reference.

Re:Wikipedia

[Walkiry]

> Wikipedia is an excellent knowledge repository about subjects that a resonable amount of people give a damn about.

I'd add to that, Wikipedia is an excellent knowledge repository for subjects that are not controversial and can be properly referrenced (i.e., peer reviewed scientific articles). When scientists (or anyone, for the matter) don't get their dicks in a knot about being right on something that is not fully understood, they'll be perfectly happy to say "our data suggests this, their data suggests that, we need to study this further to know what's more accurate."

A Wikipedia article about, say, the mitochondrial electron transport chain? Sure! We have a lot of research and plenty of data, and everyone studying the field is quite happy with each other. One about, say, abortion or the last Iraq war? Uh...

Re:Wikipedia

[Raul654]

Look for yourself at the abortion article. It's a properly referenced, neutral article on abortion. The people who wrote it were clever, in that they forked off a seperate article on the "Abortion controversy" (thus moving the debate elsewhere).

Re:Wikipedia

[Malangali]

" Most college courses explicitly ban use of any encyclopedia as a reference."

As a college professor, I would not ban any particular reference that a student chooses to consult. Regarding encyclopedias, Wiki or print, I would suggest that students refer to them as a jumping-off point for further research. In fact, one of the strengths of a good Wiki article is the reference list at the end, which, if it includes actual books, can get students to the library where they should be doing much of their research.

Sometimes a student should make a quick check of a quality internet resource and use that as a source. For example, were a student to be writing a paper about attitudes toward race in early 20th century literature, and wanted to make a quick point about the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v Ferguson, it would be perfectly appropriate for her to use and cite a reference like Wiki to check her facts and add a bit to her knowledge.

However, were the assignment specifically to discuss Plessy v. Ferguson, and the student simply cribbed off the Wiki article, I would fail the student in a New York minute.

When you grade papers, you can usually tell whether a student has done original research or if she has simply gone to the most convenient website. And when in doubt, a Google search for key phrases will often ferret out the slackers. After all, if students can use Wiki to seek out facts, their professors can too.

Re:Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

As a college professor, you probably ought to educate yourself on the correct use of the term "Wiki" and stop using it as an abbreviation for Wikipedia.

Re:Wikipedia

[Ryan Amos]

Even if it's a controversial subject, the subsequent edits should eventually remove much of the bias. No encyclopedia is a good reference for current events (like the Iraq war; in 10 years it will be a lot less controversial, assuming we're not still there) so Wikipedia is no different in that respect (actually it may be better in some ways, as Wikipedia is a lot easier to update than a 10 year old dead tree encyclopedia.)

I think Wikipedia does at least as good a job as your "traditional" encyclopedias, but obviously nothing is without faults. The great thing that comes with the internet is that a reasonably accurate source of knowledge is available to anyone with an internet connection free of charge. Should I be curious about the mitochondrial electron transport chain, I can find it immediately, and that ability eventually makes everyone more knowledgable.

Versatility

[soulsteal]

Sure they found errors in Wikipedia and Britannica, but which one can you go back to and correct?

Game, set, match!

Re:Versatility

[BushCheney08]

...but which one can you go back to and correct?

Both. Doing it to one of them is likely to get you kicked out of the library, though...

Re:Versatility

[clear_thought_05]

"to which can you return and correct"

That does NOT imply that a subject matter expert or research professional will choose to correct it, assuming they realize that they can. ... Everyday life: People can access a wealth of free information, or software or even social services, but doesn't mean that they do (or even know how). ... Your perspective is from someone who is already knowledgeable on the concept of wikipedia (or a wiki in general).

To add, I know co-workers who are fans of wikipedia, but majority of them don't realize how the material is published or even that they can contribute. (I know, I should tell them.)

Re:Versatility

[mcgroarty]

Which one is more likely to grow links to goatse.cx between the time you cite it and the time your professor reviews your paper?

Re:Versatility

[ZiakII]

Sure they found errors in Wikipedia and Britannica, but which one has information about Final Fantasy VII! Game, set, match!

Re:Versatility

[HairyCanary]

You make a good point. However, considering that the wiki is at least editable, the possibility is > 0 that someone will correct errors. With a hard printed encyclopedia, there is no possibility of fixing an error short of sending out a new printed copy or a page to all customers to update their own. And I'd bet the list of participating editors for the wiki is much, much higher than the number Britannica has hired.

Re:Versatility

[clear_thought_05]

And I'd bet the list of participating editors for the wiki is much, much higher than the number Britannica has hired.

Very safe bet, however, I would bet that a notable percentage of those "editors" are not necessarily the most knowlegdeable people in their fields. (Granted the biggest exception being technology oriented material: computers, software, internet, etc.)

Re:Versatility

[Shivetya]

It isn't unintentional errors I am worried about, it is the intentional distortion which is important and which one is more subject to that?

Volley!

Re:Versatility

[blair1q]

Which one is more likely to be more wrong tomorrow than it is today?

Re:Versatility

[hackstraw]

Sure they found errors in Wikipedia and Britannica, but which one can you go back to and correct?

Unfortunately, humans have selective memory and there will never be one version of a story. Everybody has experienced this to the "he said, she said" thing, to conspiracy theories, padded and/or disinformation from the government to the press, etc. (I bet you never read in a mainstream newspaper that Reagan was a crack dealer, right? And the government recently killed the king Crip.) Also, its a common saying with lawyers that an eye witness is the worst witness.

As if the past really existed anyway. It certainly does not exist anymore.

Re:Versatility

[Anonymous Coward]

neither. you use the permalink on the wikipedia article, so the professor sees the same version you did, doofus.

Re:Versatility

[Taevin]

I know co-workers who are fans of wikipedia, but majority of them don't realize how the material is published or even that they can contribute.

Well assuming they actually read the text of the article and are not just scanning for big words to make them look smart, what do they think those little "edit" links next to each section of article text are for? More than that, who told them about Wikipedia without mentioning a little about it? I'm not saying that you are embellishing the reality of your co-workers' cognitive deficiencies but even the front page of Wikipedia says this:

Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

If that welcome line didn't say enough already, it links to two wiki pages about Wikipedia and about the editing. Needless to say, I've never met an 'expert' that has that severe of a case of a lack of attention to detail. In that case we may be better off with those people not reading the article carefully enough, misunderstanding the information, and spouting off their misrepresentation of the topic instead of adding their own 'expert' opinion causing confusion and frustration for the rest of us.

*Please note that I am not disparaging against non-experts, I too lack the experience to be considered an expert in any field. I fully support the idea of a wiki and understand that several intelligent non-experts can combine their own knowledge to create a single pool of information at the same level, or even above that, of an expert. I am merely suggesting that people who lack the attention to detail to notice all the ways to get to the edit page of a wiki article also lack the attention to detail necessary to acquire anything more than a common knowledge understanding of a topic.

Re:Versatility

[clear_thought_05]

I'm 99% sure they just arrived through google (in fact I seldom land on the main page myself). Some things I can say, most pages on the web are overloaded and cluttered, hence I don't see it as impossible for someone to focus on just the main content and skip things like you said. Additionally, if you click on the edit button on a page with lots of content (or linkage), it can be difficult to understand what you're seeing. Finally, it is VERY common for people to skip the introductory pages, welcome/about pages or even the FAQ. ... On my personal website I get several dozen questions easily answered on my FAQ or About pages.

Re:Versatility

[fbartho]

"(I know, I should tell them.)"

Not unless they're experts in some domain that happens to need fleshing out or correction...

Re:Versatility

[bogado]

Simply cite the revision you used. By this I mean, "Article on frogs on wikipedia on the revision made in 06:31, 17 November 2005 : http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frog&old id=28572307". If any new information like links to goatse.cx are added the person who is reading you work will know that it was not from that version that you based your work.

Re:Versatility

[petermgreen]

if you are citing an encyclopedia then you are probablly doing something wrong.

if something matters enough that you are citing sources then you REALLY should be citing primary sources from the appropriate field.

Re:Versatility

[drsquare]

If you have to put the correct facts in yourself, what is the point in the site even existing? You may as well just write it down for yourself.

Re:Versatility

[StalinsNotDead]

"(I know, I should tell them.)"

Not unless they're experts in some domain that happens to need fleshing out or correction...

Maybe they should be told so they realize anyone can edit it, so they don't trust it implicitly.

Re:Versatility

[vertinox]

Which one is more likely to grow links to goatse.cx between the time you cite it and the time your professor reviews your paper?

Lets just say I'm banned from using the color copier at my local college library.

Re:Versatility

[Anonymous Coward]

Au contrair.

Simply only cite Wikipedia's specific revisions when it's applicable. Some blanket ban on Wikipedia as a primary source is silly. Wikipedia has a number of strengths, and as such you should use them!

Recently, I wrote a Research Paper which, like many research papers, started off with a general overview of the problem. During this overview, I cited Wikipedia numerous times, because Wikipedia is just that: An excellent overview of a given topic. When I moved into specifics though, the citations were exclusively journal articles and news reports (It was a research paper in the social sciences, meaning news reports of recent developments pertaining to the topic were, again, appropriate).

But sometimes, Wikipedia IS a primary source for certain fields! As for a hypothetical example, Wikipedia could be reviewed as an example of popular culture especially well, as not only are articles written ABOUT pop culture, generally they're written and edited by MEMBERS of that particular pop culture group, providing an introspective of sorts, which can be quite valuable.

Re:Versatility

[multipartmixed]

This is not true at all levels of education. In particular, elementary school children would do well to cite an encyclopedia. Doing so teaches good habits (cite your sources) without requiring them to go to impractical extremes, such as making sense out of scientific journals.

And yes, elementary school teachers are accepting websites as sources. Considering the discerning skills of the children in question, Wikipedia is not a bad place for them to do their research.

It's sure a lot better than having your kids randomly visit "bears.com".

Re:Versatility

[CaptainCarrot]

Hell, which of them is more likely to have an article all about goatse.cx in the first place?

Now, that's comprehensive. Thankfully, it's not comprehensive enough to include the original image in the article.

Re:Versatility

[Sithgunner]

Let's see the chance which of the errors 'actually' gets fixed.
Of course, if you let the experts check every wikipedia article... might get fixed earlier.

Re:Versatility

[HairyCanary]

Another good point. I'd be interested to know what the qualifications are for the Britannica editors. Are they subject matter experts, or expert researchers?

Re:Versatility

[TERdON]

wouldn't it be much easier just to use the permalink?

Re:Versatility

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that would your fault for citing a tertiary source.

You should never cite Wikipedia as a source in an academic paper, just as you should never cite Britannica as a source. What you should do is use them as a starting point, to do your own research. Even if you just grab a set of references that the authors of the article used, read them, and cite them as sources, that's far better.

Assuming you're professor isn't an idiot (which may not be a fair assumption - many of them are idiots), they're going to mark you down for relying on a tertiary source either way, because it shows that you didn't do your own research.

Evolving vs. Static

[mattwarden]

I think you would also need to take into consideration the maturity of the chosen articles, since Wikipedia's content evolves continuously rather than on set publication dates. Newer articles probably would have a higher error rate.

Re:Evolving vs. Static

[krgallagher]

"Newer articles probably would have a higher error rate."

I think the choice to use scince-related articles slants the results. There are not a lot of people who feel capable of writing about Epitaxy. On the other hand, those subjects that are more accessible to a large group of people, such as Ethanol or Thyroid have significantly higher error rates. I think it is probable that more popular subjects would have a higher error count due to 'urban myth' being included as fact.

Re:Evolving vs. Static

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the whole point. Differences between static and evolving content is part of what they were trying to measure. Controlling for it would completely obviate the study.

Re:Evolving vs. Static

[mattwarden]

But they did exert control. They did not randomly pick articles. They picked articles that would likely be more evolved and less error prone (intentionally or not). This makes the results not representative of Wikipedia's error rate in general. So, no, that wasn't the point.

Accuracy - Good, Writing Poor

[ehaggis]

As the article states, the writing style in Wikipedia can be poor. Low diction, poor grammar and bad structure contribute to the chaos.

Most research I do on Wikipedia does not depend on good writing, but accurate information, especially on pop culture items or obscure "geek" subjects. Wikipedia does well in this. I have seen defaced articles "heal" with ten minutes of the incident.

As a contributor to Wikipedia, I am glad it is gaining widespread notoriety and validation.

Re:Accuracy - Good, Writing Poor

[Anonymous Coward]

"Low diction, poor grammar and bad structure contribute to the chaos."

That is just indicative of the Internet culture.

Re:Accuracy - Good, Writing Poor

[ehaggis]

I agree. Wikipedia naturally attracts engineering / science types who tend not to be writers (broad stroke here, but you catch my drift.) Soliciting the "artsy" types may be part of the remedy.

Re:Accuracy - Good, Writing Poor

[omeg]

Yes, but poor language is easily fixed. Afterall, I don't think there will be edit/revert wars over whether site x was founded earlier then site y, or whether site x was founded earlier than site y.

Re:Accuracy - Good, Writing Poor

[Viper Daimao]

Yeah, I think wikipedia needs more exposure and more people committed to writing entries. Most articles I see have a set handful of users committed to upkeeping the article. This is all fine until you get to a controversial article, like on some political figure. Then you get these 3-5 editors keeping their view of the article's POV and what info is relavent and what sources are accepted. A stray anonymous user might come in and impart some knowlege or alternate POV, but for better or worse, the small group of committed editors will revert or change the contributions back to their earlier POV and scope.

Informative

[drewzhrodague]

I find Wikipedia quite informative, and easy to get to. I don't see what the problem is, or why those people want to class-action Wikipedia. I've learned a bunch of things by browsing, and investigating things mentioned in the articles. Even if Wikipedia were a little bit innacurate, it would certainly beat out my first 8 years of education, where I've found almost all of the science I've learned is actually wrong (by talking to scientists, and reading books, and wikipedia).

Re:Informative

[Morgor]

it would certainly beat out my first 8 years of education, where I've found almost all of the science I've learned is actually wrong (by talking to scientists, and reading books, and wikipedia). You wouldn't happen to be from Kansas, would you? ;)

Re:Informative

[Ender Ryan]

Certain people are afraid of Wikipedia, for many different reasons, all of which apply to the Internet at large. A lot of the criticism comes from shitbags who are competitors to Wikipedia in some sense.

Most of Wikipedia's critics are quite despisable, INSHO.

Re:Informative

[drewzhrodague]

No, but schools all across the country (US). Catholic school, while probably better than the ghetto-kid-storage school, didn't give me much of an education. I was also scolded alot for asking the wrong kinds of questions. Now I have a GED, and I know more than some college grads I've met. What a bizarre world we live in.

Re:Informative

[mdielmann]

I don't know what you mean by incorrect science teaching, and would like some clarification. For instance, I was taught the Bohr model for atomic configuration, the Rutherford model, and the electron cloud model (can't remember the exact name, but the one where the inner electrons are mostly irrelevant, and the outer electrons control reactivity and molecular arrangement). While none of these is as accurate as some quantum theories about how electrons, atoms, and molecules operate, none are incorrect, per se. They are merely incomplete. But how many kids in grade 6 are going to understand the math behind any of the quantum theories, anyway? Using more basic models to increase your grasp of a subject so you can more easily grasp the more advanced models is a common technique in science, as is using simpler models when they adequately describe the problem set (Newtonian vs. Einsteinian physics).
Hopefully your education wasn't outright wrong, but merely incomplete. I wouldn't guarantee that in most public education schools in North America, though.

Re:Informative

[drewzhrodague]

You see, I had none of that. No chemistry, no calc, no trig. Instead, I got random insignifigant battles, simple science things that were wrong (blood cells break open on the sharp edges of broken vessels to clot), no physics, no astronomy. I did have some random teachers that were sense-making, and actually educational -- I've read Shakespeare, and some classics that stuck. Lots of teachers stressing memorization, which I found useless. I tell my SO that I would've been fine coming out of 6th grade, and going off to college. I wasn't some special smarty wizz kid, but a normal interested human. I found my education at 8 different schools a bit lacking, and left to get my GED when I was legally allowed.

Speaking of poor writing....

[Anonymous Coward]

Writing style

Nature said its reviewers found that Wikipedia entries were often poorly structured and confused.

The Encyclopedia Britannica declined to comment directly on the findings.

But a spokesman highlighted the quality of the entries on the free resource.

"But it is not the case that errors creep in on an occasional basis or that a couple of articles are poorly written," Tom Panelas, director of corporate communications is quoted as saying in Nature.

This confused me, until I realized that single-sentence paragraphs 2 and 3 should be a compound sentence.

Re:Speaking of poor writing....

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just sad that Wikipedia entries are confused! Maybe they tried to cast a spell they didn't remember (too much nethack). Or maybe they are *confusing*...

Nature editorial asks scientists to contribute

[AxelBoldt]

Nature also published an editorial which asks scientists to contribute to Wikipedia: "Nature would like to encourage its readers to help. The idea is not to seek a replacement for established sources such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but to push forward the grand experiment that is Wikipedia, and to see how much it can improve. Select a topic close to your work and look it up on Wikipedia. If the entry contains errors or important omissions, dive in and help fix them. It need not take too long. And imagine the pay-off: you could be one of the people who helped turn an apparently stupid idea into a free, high-quality global resource."

Re:Nature editorial asks scientists to contribute

[jjthe2]

So did Nature fix the errors it found?

Re:Nature editorial asks scientists to contribute

[ZipR]

Perhaps the management of Encyclopaedia Britannica should make the same suggestion?

Re:Nature editorial asks scientists to contribute

[Khalid]

This an excellent initiative, as a Wikipedia editor I'll try to seed that idea. i.e to have articles about Wikipedia written in the press (with an interesting readership I mean, not the tabloids crap) and then ask the readers to visit Wikipedia to correct or enhance articles in their field.

Re:Nature editorial asks scientists to contribute

[StupendousMan]

And will you then ask them to visit the site
every week to remove the changes made by
people who aren't experts in the field?

That's why I gave up on it -- it's like
trying to build a sandcastle too close to the
water's edge. I'd rather use my time to
create something that won't be destroyed
after a month or two.

Re:Nature editorial asks scientists to contribute

[Khalid]

Well this is a commen critic, I will call it something like "The price for doing business". Wikipedia is a moving target, I think that the solution to that real problem is to have a Wikipedia 1.0 with peer reviewed and validated articles. Too bad you left Wikipedia whe need good and didacted editors.

Re:Nature editorial asks scientists to contribute

[HooliganIntellectual]

As a former Wikipedia editor I'd like to warn scientists about the culture of Wikipedia, which will quickly frustrate their efforts to contribute. If you as a scientist find a glaring problem that is extensive, then decided to delete it or change it totally, other Wikipedians will "revert" your changes as "vandalism." And the odds are high that they know nothing about the subject you've tried to change or edit. Once Wikipedia reigns in this behavior of its more rabid participants, then the project will become one where more people can contribute equally.

Re:Nature editorial asks scientists to contribute

[swillden]

If you as a scientist find a glaring problem that is extensive, then decided to delete it or change it totally, other Wikipedians will "revert" your changes as "vandalism."

There's an easy workaround to this, though. If you make a large change (and, frankly, large changes *are* likely to be vandalism) and it gets reverted, just post to the talk page, explaining your credentials and highlighting the nature of the problems, then post your edits again, with a comment that the changes are legitimate and to please refer to the talk page before reverting.

As for deleting an article because it's wrong... just don't do that. Replace it with an accurate stub at the very least.

Re:Nature editorial asks scientists to contribute

[Anonymous Coward]

IAAS. (or should I say "Stand back! I am a scientist" ??)

That has not stopped editors, deletionists and vandals from undoing my contributions, even if they are within my field of study. In fact, getting things to remain is an up hill battle, and I have given up, the effort is just not worth it.

Oh, and scientists are quite used to having every word examined, just not having our words twisted.

I am not attempting to use my university degrees to prop up my arguments, my words have to stand by their own powers. What this boils down to is signal and noise. One scales well, the other does not.

Re:Nature editorial asks scientists to contribute

[p0ppe]

You mean like Nupedia? That sure was a success.

Bad News for Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

Turns out not only are their articles less accurate, they are less concise too.

Which *pedia is better?

[eldavojohn]

Three errors per article? Come on, do you know how much a set of Britannicas costs? Even the on-line subscriptions are $70 annually or $12 monthly!

Ok, so the error ratio is around 4:3 but what about the cost ratio?

My consumerism values tell me that Wikipedia wins out big time.

Why are these two even being compared? One is a paid service where you expect all the information to be correct and the other is a free service where you're told that there's no garuntees if it's accurate. Sounds like two completely different services to me.

Re:Which *pedia is better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm...one repository of knowledge is already slightly (OK, a lot cheaper)...

Now all we have to do is get "Don't Panic" put on the Wikipedia gate page

Surely..

[DDiabolical]

It should be about quality rather than quantity?

I don't care how long the text is I just want accurate information, which is the entire reason people use encyclopedias!

Re:Surely..

[barawn]

So a *pedia article on Slashdot that says "Slashdot is a web site" would be good for you, then?

Hey, it's accurate!

Re:Surely..

[Irish_Samurai]

Going hand in hand with your comment, whatever happened to cross referencing?

I usually don't take something as a fact until multiple credible sources state the same thing. I use wikipedia to see if one of my hypothesis' are correct, and then I go out and look for more reference information to solidify my argument.

Re:Surely..

[Prophet of Nixon]

"Mostly harmless" would be good enough for me.

Another thing

[Ostien]

Does Britannica have extencive articles on Lightsaber combat?

Wikipedia: 1
Britannica: 0

Re:Another thing

[Anonymous Coward]

That's all just made up shit, dude. Why would you want that in an encyclopedia??

Re:Another thing

[laughingcoyote]

That's all just made up shit, dude. Why would you want that in an encyclopedia??

While I don't have a set of Brittanicas right here, I would guess that you can find references in Brittanica to the plays of Shakespeare, Aphrodite, Zeus, Thor, and The Odyssey.

All of that is "made up shit", but a culture's fiction and mythology is still relevant to a discussion of the culture in question. So why shouldn't Wikipedia, with its quicker-changing nature, have information on more modern fiction and myth?

Re:Another thing

[smallguy78]

...or the fine art of pegging ??!

Re:Another thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Does the Britannica article on lightsaber combat have a large note suggesting that it is completely ripped off from a book written by someone else?

Well isn't it obvious?

[Red Samurai]

Of course Wikipedia would be better, it's CONSTANTLY being updated by hundreds of thousands of contributers. That article just states the obvious.

Hah! "Science" articles!

[ceeam]

What does Britannica say about "Goatse"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse

Re:Hah! "Science" articles!

[Volanin]

The "technical approach" of the wikipedia article gives me the creeps as much as the image itself, man...

Re:Hah! "Science" articles!

[penguinoid]

Goatse.cx -- where most statistics come from.

Re:Hah! "Science" articles!

[Citizen of Earth]

What does Britannica say about "Goatse"?

More telling is what Britannica says about Wikipedia:

Sorry, we were unable to find results for your search.

Re:Hah! "Science" articles!

[_xeno_]

From that page:

Categories: Shock sites | Internet memes | Anal eroticism

I'll bet Britannica doesn't even have an "anal eroticism" section!

(I've yet to work up the courage to actually click on that link though, for fear of how many articles on anal eroticism the Wikipedia actually contains.)

Re:Hah! "Science" articles!

[Dirtside]

What does Britannica say about "Goatse"?

Finally! An on-topic link to Goatse! Will wonders never cease?

Did they fix them?

[Ctrl-Z]

So, since they found these inaccuracies in the article, I would like to know whether they edited them and fixed them as they went, or just played the part of the silent observer. To me, this is the great thing about Wikipedia; if you know the subject and you find an inaccuracy, be bold and fix it already.

Longer article...

[everphilski]

... doesn't mean a better article. Encyclopedias are meant to be concise and to the point. A starting point for research, not a be-all and end-all. And I don't agree with normalizing errors to the length of the article, it should be the number of errors per article. Just because you wrote more stuff it doesn't give you the leeway to screw up more...

Re:Longer article...

[barawn]

Just because you wrote more stuff it doesn't give you the leeway to screw up more...

Uh, so if the Brittanica has an article which says "Bill Clinton was the 41st President of the United States" and that's all, and Wikipedia has a 12-page entry on Clinton which gets his date-of-birth wrong by one day but is perfectly accurate everywhere else, that's okay?

Look at some of the articles listed. The Wiki article (on Robert Burns Woodward) has a detailed breakdown of his life, his career, discoveries, and Nobel prize. The Wiki article's section on his honors and awards - which is just a list - is longer than the entire Britannica article!

Re:Longer article...

[Kjella]

... doesn't mean a better article. Encyclopedias are meant to be concise and to the point. A starting point for research, not a be-all and end-all. And I don't agree with normalizing errors to the length of the article, it should be the number of errors per article. Just because you wrote more stuff it doesn't give you the leeway to screw up more...

Says who? I find encyclopedias to be rather arbitrarily restricted by volume and cost-benefit of paying people to write it. As long as it is content fit for an encyclopedia, I think it can go into any minute detail it will.

As for errors and article length, that depends on the nature of the error. I would like to see a break-down of "comparable" errors, meaning facts stated in both sources. Basicly, if you shortened both to contain the same information, which would have fewer errors?

Also I'd like to see an error ratio between "core" and "fringe" content in the article, using Britannica as a divider and length as a pseudovariable of how much information is in each. My expected outcome would be that "core" would have a lower error ratio than "fringe", so that even if it has more errors in total, the important parts could be better.

Re:Longer article...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Encyclopedias are meant to be concise and to the point. A starting point for research, not a be-all and end-all. And I don't agree with normalizing errors to the length of the article, it should be the number of errors per article. Just because you wrote more stuff it doesn't give you the leeway to screw up more...

I don't know about you, but for me, more content on a subject is better. Especially if that content is written properly, with the most important/general information first and more detailed information following. If you want a meaningful metric it should be errors/information imparted.

For example. According to the metric used in the test referenced the phrases "Dogs are canines. These mammals have three legs." would score as 1 error for 8 words. While "Dogs are three legged mammals" would score one error for five words. We can all see that is non really a proper measure. Your proposed method, however, would rate both articles as one error for one article, which is also improper since the second article contains more information that the first. A more meaningful (but harder to generate) metric would be errors per pertinent fact. That would rate the above articles as 1 error for 2 facts and 1 error for 3 facts, respectively. More words are not necessarily beneficial, but I'd rather reward more content (especially for a medium like an online encyclopedia) than punish it. One of the things I appreciate about Wikipedia is that the content on certain topics is exhaustive, providing a much more meaningful and complete understanding of a topic than a traditional encyclopedia.

Re:Longer article...

[Red Flayer]

"Encyclopedias are meant to be concise and to the point"

Encyclopedias are meant to be exhaustive repositories of fact, whether about a particular subject, or about everything (like Wikipedia or the EB). It's accuracy concerns, cost, and space constraints that keep the entries short and concise.

Re:Longer article...

[Anonymous Coward]

Encyclopedias are supposed to be comprehensive, not terse. Go find me a definition that says otherwise. Do you really think the phrase "encyclopedic knowledge" implies conciseness?

That being said, I agree with your general point that length != better, and normalizing the errors to length doesn't prove squat.

Re:Longer article...

[Eil]

Agreed for the most part. However, when the Wikipedians made the point that Wikipedia articles tended to be longer, they make the implication that it also contains more information. I don't know if this is true or not, but assuming it is, it seems like a fairly valid metric for error rate.

Re:Longer article...

[julesh]

Yes, but the nature reviewers were instructed to count omission of any important information as an error, which will go at least some way to counteract this tendency.

Get your facts info from more than one source

[nysus]

No resource, no matter who it's written by, is absolutely definitive. Any thorough research will require going to many different sources to arrive at the best approximation of the "truth." Any person who relies on just one source for their information any topic is making a mistake. Wikipedia, Britannica, and other reference works should be considered only as starting points for further research. They should be considered nothing more than signposts for finding your way to other ideas and avenues to explore a topic.

Re:Get your facts info from more than one source

[katz]

Browsing charged issues in English is one thing; one can only wonder* what the Arabic pages say.

*or learn the language.

Re:Get your facts info from more than one source

[OBeardedOne]

Quoting - "No resource, no matter who it's written by, is absolutely definitive. Any thorough research will require going to many different sources to arrive at the best approximation of the "truth."

Very true. But that's where Wikipedia beats encyclopedias hands down. Most entries in encyclopedias are ultimately written by no more than a handful of people. Wikipedia articles on the other hand are ultimately written and edited by tens if not hundreds of people and the resulting article becomes the amalgamation of common truth - or as close as you are going to get to it. I'm not saying don't use other resources, but comparatively the contribution of many more authors to Wikepedia will ultimately make the information available far more definitive than other sources. At least that's its potential and I for one support that potential wholehartedly - early stage hiccups aside.

Re:Get your facts info from more than one source

[nysus]

Yes, but there is latency between the time incorrect information gets posted to the wikipedia article and the time it gets corrected. Whether that period is seconds, hours, or days, it's wise to take nothing in a wikipedia article as factual or accurate.

Also, there's no guarantee that any of the articles are written by anyone who knows what they are talking about, especially the articles about more obscure topics. Ideally, an article about jupe production in the early 1900s would be written by some expert on early industrial manufacturing processes. The reality is, that's not always going to be the case.

Re:Get your facts info from more than one source

[nysus]

Typo: I meant "jute" not "jupe"

Use Wikiagra - Increase Length and Girth!

[ScentCone]

But much of the extra length in the WP articles is often more commentator-ish, or blocks of material containing links, etc. Things that more traditional encyclopedias wouldn't want to include. And a lot of lengthier WP articles tend to get repititive, or have summaries and details that come close to being mutally unnecessary. Not a bad thing, just a different thing. Saying that WP articles are longer, and thus represent a lower real error rate is pretty misleading, I think. It's not the length of your article, it's how you use it.

Re:Use Wikiagra - Increase Length and Girth!

[hackstraw]

Use Wikiagra - increase length and girth

Dude, Wikiagra is for the neverending hardon due to a community of people contributing to the cause. All of the increase length and girth stuff is for suckers.

Its people like this that keeps my spam filter busy.

Re:Use Wikiagra - Increase Length and Girth!

[suwain_2]

Things that more traditional encyclopedias wouldn't want to include.

Although there are some Wikipedia articles that are long and unnecessarily drawn out, sometimes I like having a long article. A "normal" encyclopedia might give a brief mention. With Wikipedia, I can learn a lot about something, and then visit some links to learn more.

Re:Use Wikiagra - Increase Length and Girth!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Its people like this that keeps my spam filter busy."

Corrections: It's people like this that keep my spam filter busy.

Re:Use Wikiagra - Increase Length and Girth!

[ScentCone]

A "normal" encyclopedia might give a brief mention. With Wikipedia, I can learn a lot about something, and then visit some links to learn more

We don't disagree - and I often use it that way, too. My point isn't to debate the utility of that, it's to debate the utility of comparing WP to a traditional encyclopedia format, and especially to do so and then pretend that errors-per-word stats are a meaningful indicator of WP's quality vs. something else. It's apples v. oranges, that's all.

12 % of Nature authors consult Wikipedia weekly

[AxelBoldt]

Note also that they "surveyed more than 1,000 Nature authors" and found that "more than 70% had heard of Wikipedia and 17% of those consulted it on a weekly basis." I wonder what percentage of Nature authors consult the Encylopaedia Britannica on a weekly basis.

Re:12 % of Nature authors consult Wikipedia weekly

[NeoSkandranon]

That probably depends on what percentage of Nature authors own a set of Britannica. I'm pretty sure all of them have a computer with internet access.

Re:12 % of Nature authors consult Wikipedia weekly

[Anonymous Coward]

Your question is a good one, but I myself have to wonder what percentage of Nature authors consult any encyclopedia at all.

I'm beginning to wonder what any of this really matters. I mean seriously, I don't really consult any encyclopedia very much at all. If I want to know about something, I usually use a search engine--generally Google--and peruse different sites to get a sense of what's known about something, and what different reputable sources have to say. If I'm really serious about knowing something about something, I don't go to an encyclopedia, I go to a detailed primary source--i.e., an article or book.

I have a lot of respect for Wikipedia, but I have a number of problems with conclusions being drawn from this study. First, this was a study of science topics. My guess is that there will be less "wiggle room" for subjectivity and political discourse in these articles than articles in the social sciences, history, arts, or even controversial topics like global climate change. Note that the recent fiasco over John Seigenthaler wasn't a science article. If you look at the list, you'll notice that the topics were pretty straightforward. They couldn't have constructed more of a strawman test than what they did.

Second, even within this strawman test, it's nevertheless the case that Wikipedia did have more errors than Britannica. The difference wasn't huge, but it was there. And although the number of "serious errors" was the same, the difference in number of errors was very large in some articles. The largest number of errors, 19, was for an article on Mendeleev, and was in Wikipedia. That number is much larger than the number of errors for any other topic in either encyclopedia. I'd suggest that for more controversial topics, the error rate is likely to be even higher.

Finally, in my mind, the most serious problem with Wikipedia isn't the number of errors, or the quality of errors, but the fact that I have no way of knowing from article to article what to anticipate. That is, I have no way of knowing whether I can trust what I'm reading, because I don't know who the authors are. Wikipedia is taking steps to correct this, but very minor ones. If I know who the authors are, I might be able to estimate what degree of error is in the article. With Wikipedia, there's no such thing. Granted, other encyclopedias don't list the authors of their articles, but then again, I don't use many encyclopedias much at all (see above).

Re:12 % of Nature authors consult Wikipedia weekly

[Paul Crowley]

OK, you're already at four, but let me give that a hearty MOD PARENT UP! Nicely observed that man.

I wonder what percentage have the means to do so conveniently? Of those, I wonder what percentage actually do so weekly?

Re:12 % of Nature authors consult Wikipedia weekly

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming that most researchers work in universities, they probably have access to the Britannica website (which contains everything in the printed encyclopedia) through an institutional subscription.

Wikipedia is better...

[windowpain]

Wikipedia is better except for the occasional libelous outright lie and the fact that virtually every article is filled with grammatical errors.

Re:Wikipedia is better...

[FireFury03]

virtually every article is filled with grammatical errors.

The majority of articles I've read on Wikipedia are actually surprisingly good grammatically. The most obvious problem I keep seeing is where someone has edited a section of an article to expand or clarify it but hasn't modified another section of the same article, leading to slight repetition.

Of course, the advantage of the Wiki is that you can (and should) correct errors that you spot, whether they are factual or grammatical.

DUPS

[brenddie]

I wonder how wikipedia handles dupes.
Maybee something to learn there.

There is still one critical difference -

[old_skul]

Britannica is authored by an entity which takes responsibility for its errors and has a long history of accuracy. Its content is "vetted", meaning that there is a measure of academic validity to what was written.

Some Wikipedia entries are far more detailed and far more accurate than Britannica's - however, that doesn't change the fact that the content was written by unknown persons with unknown source material for their entries.

Re:There is still one critical difference -

[AxelBoldt]

Britannica is authored by an entity which takes responsibility for its errors and has a long history of accuracy.

That belief, largely a result of advertising, has been throughly undermined by this study. I read any EB article on science, I just learned three false facts. How exactly do they take responsibility for that failing? Can I ask for my money back?

Re:There is still one critical difference -

[trygstad]

Many, many Wikipedians are NOT anonymous. Me for one. I take full responsibility for (and stand behind) anything I write on Wikipedia. Just as I do on Slashdot. Or anywhere I contribute online.

Re:There is still one critical difference -

[Anonymous Coward]

"Britannica is authored by an entity which takes responsibility for its errors and has a long history of accuracy. Its content is "vetted", meaning that there is a measure of academic validity to what was written."

See also here and here.

Re:There is still one critical difference -

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why I can't find any info about you in your profile?

Since when?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Wikipedia articles in the sample were, on average, 2.6 times longer than Britannica's"

Since when does longer mean better? If anything, Britannica's conciseness could be the result of several revisions and reviews for impact per word. Encyclopedias are about bang for the buck -- you can't fit everything into an article. It's meant to be a starting point.

That's where Wikipedia is supposed to excel -- the amount of live links available to primary web sites in addition to bibliography.

Re:Since when?

[freeweed]

Encyclopedias are about bang for the buck -- you can't fit everything into an article.

PRINTED encyclopedias fit this model. There's never been any reason to keep encyclopedia articles short, other than the sheer cost of reproduction.

On a webserver, it's trivial to have articles two, three, even ten times longer and still be feasible.

Hmm, 200 more inch thick bound volumes of Britannica, or a new 300GB hard drive. The single best thing about Wikipedia is that it's NOT limited in scope. Longer articles, more varied articles, more pictures, *anything* is possible. With the caveat that it's good information, of course, but that applies to any source of information regardless of length.

Re:Since when?

[coolcold]

but longer means more words, thus more likely to get spelling errors and such

I think that just specify their samples were abit unfair

Re:Since when?

[shish]

Since when does longer mean better?

Since the sentance was talking about average errors per word, and not suggesting that longer is better per se.

Two questions

[Colgate2003]

"Accuracy per word," or whatever you want to call it, may be greater, but are those words as well-written or necessary in the Wikipedia article?

Also, less than 3 errors/article compared to about 4 errors/article gives us more than 33% more errors/article Wikipedia. Many people (including Nature) are calling this close. Since when is 33% close? "Closer than expected," maybe but not close.

Re:Two questions

[Dachannien]

Also, less than 3 errors/article compared to about 4 errors/article gives us more than 33% more errors/article Wikipedia.

That's the sort of conclusion best made possible when your results are only given with one significant digit.

Re:Two questions

[shish]

Since when is 33% close?

Since the same time a person who wins a hundred mile race by an inch is close, even though they have a 100% win record compared to the competitor's 0%.

Re:Two questions

[shaitand]

Since 3 versus 4 is a number low enough that percentage comparisons would only serve as fud and would not be meaningful. There simply is not enough sample for that.

Further, 1 error would not pass a reasonable margin of error for human experts.

Man with one watch ..

[OzPeter]

One of my fav sayings (which also translates well into a coding practice when people want multiple copies of the same data in separate locations)

"A man with one watch always knows what time it is, but a man with two watches never knows."

Unless of course one of the watches is a nixie watch and that the batteries have run out after 2 days usage, or the cathodes have busted from all that shaking.

Re:Man with one watch ..

[Flyboy Connor]

"A man with one watch always knows what time it is, but a man with two watches never knows."

Unless of course one of the watches is a nixie watch and that the batteries have run out after 2 days usage, or the cathodes have busted from all that shaking.

Nice, but I would use another counterargument.

A man with one watch always knows his personal time, but will never know how his personal time is correlated with the actual time. While a man with a hundred watches will be able to average over all their indicated times and, taking the standard deviation into account, will have a pretty good idea what time it actually is. Assuming, of course, that all watches have been set to approach the correct time at some point during their life.

Otto Z. Stern, MSM Wiki trolls can go suck it.

[theflyingdingleberry]

The Register has some funny stuff, but the flamepost regarding Wikipedia really pissed me off. I'm not hitting that fetid site anymore to ring up their stats. This study shows that while Wikipedia isn't perfect, its quality is much higher than one would ever guess just by going by the mainstream media's assessment of it. Rock on Wikipedia, rock on!

Can't reference Wikipedia because it changes

[nincehelser]

Wikipedia seems fine for informal use, but how can you possible cite sources with something that is constantly changing?

Re:Can't reference Wikipedia because it changes

[Lorenzarius]

The current version of an article is changing, but a particular past version is static. If you really need to reference Wikipedia, you can go to the page history page and choose one of the version. They actually have a page on citing Wikipedia.

Re:Can't reference Wikipedia because it changes

[radja]

by mentioning the date, or mentioning something about information being subject to change over time. normal encyclopedias have the same problem, it's just that there are less changes. the versions come slower.

Re:Can't reference Wikipedia because it changes

[Xzzy]

Shouldn't be citing encyclopedias to begin with. When I was in school, I had teachers that would mark student's work down if they used an encyclopedia as a source.

To my eyes their only legitimite use is for someone new to a subject getting a concentrated overview to get them started with real research.

Re:Can't reference Wikipedia because it changes

[pigwiggle]

Encyclopedias are analogous to news aggregate sites; it's where you start looking for the information you need. Citing Britannica is no less ridiculous than citing yahoonews.

I use Wikipedia to get the broad view of a subject. There are usually some very good bullets pointing me in the direction I need; get some good keywords, a more refined idea of the topic.

Incidentally, I just used Wikipedia to find out why my father-in-law booked a guided fishing trip in the middle of winter. Turns out there are winter and summer runs for steelhead trout.

Re:Can't reference Wikipedia because it changes

[omeg]

Because they have permalinks? Besides, you're supposed to add a date of revision whenever you quote or refer, anyway.

Re:Can't reference Wikipedia because it changes

[DroopyStonx]

There's a history section of all the edits.

If you note the date and time of your cite, you should be fine. I'm sure people know that Wikis are ever changing.

In other words: don't put too much worry into it.

Re:Can't reference Wikipedia because it changes

[shaitand]

Yes but you are talking about a printed encyclopedia. Printed encyclopedias are intentionally brief and not comprehensive. The sheer volume of material prevents comprehensive coverage. Wikipedia is not designed in this manner. Authors include as much information as possible on Wikipedia.

For an example compare the entries on winemaking in the two. One encyclopedia explains how to make wine, the other merely defines it.

Re:Can't reference Wikipedia because it changes

[petermgreen]

that or when you need a quick reference for a well known fact (say the permativity of free space) sure you may have it in a book or notes somewhere but its much quicker to just check wp.

Re:Can't reference Wikipedia because it changes

[IdahoEv]

What drives me crazy is how trivially easy it would be to provide a widget on every page that said "static link to this revision" that would provide a link the current most revent version. You shouldn't *have* to go hunting through the history.

One programmer with access to the database could add this feature to wikipedia in about fifteen minutes.

Re:Can't reference Wikipedia because it changes

[Lorenzarius]

Well actually they already do have such a link on every article: It's in the toolbox to the left (Cite this article).

Re:Can't reference Wikipedia because it changes

[tedhiltonhead]

Even easier than going to the history is the "Permanent Link" feature, found on the left side of articles.

Re:Can't reference Wikipedia because it changes

[HTL2001]

"The citation should normally include the full date and time of the article revision you are using, because the page may well change radically between when you view it and when somebody else following your reference views it."

thats from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wiki pedia
and is a standard part of formatting a citation to any webpage. Anyone checking will just have to check revision history

Re:Can't reference Wikipedia because it changes

[nahdude812]

Another sibling of your comment pointed out that there's a "Permanent Link" link in the left column on all articles that provides this feature.

Re:Can't reference Wikipedia because it changes

[charlieo88]

Alas, if only you had a quick reference to look up the spelling of permittivity.

Re:Can't reference Wikipedia because it changes

[LibraryPerson]

Wikipedia is no different than any other resource. When referencing Internet sources, one must always identify the the date and the version. Print resources, similarly must identify copyright date and edition. Good research requires validation of any source, print, online, eyewitness. Learning to collect and evaluate information carefully leads to true literacy. Just don't be stupid, making and consider any source the definitive answer - unless it's me.

Re:Can't reference Wikipedia because it changes

[petermgreen]

this is /. not some important document why should i give a fuck about making my spelling/punctuation/grammer here perfect as long as it gets the point accross?

mind you at least you had the guts to make your spelling nazi post under your username rather than as an anonymous coward

The Nature of the Errors count.

[apberman]

It's not the number of errors, it's their nature. Equating an error in birthyear vs. an error in, oh, say, claiming that someone was involved in the Kennedy Assasination, is just stupid.

Re:The Nature of the Errors count.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's posts like this that tempt me to register and earn mod points to give.

You are absolutely correct.

Re:The Nature of the Errors count.

[shaitand]

Saying someone was involved in the Kennedy assassination is not an error, it is an opinion.

Re:The Nature of the Errors count.

[gurps_npc]

Worse, having your coworker slander you and your father as a joke, is not an error, it is an obnoxious bit of stupidity. (As was the case behind that little error you mentioned).

To then complain about it and sue because no one fixed instead of say, actually fixing it YOURSELF, the way the Wiki is expected to work, just proves that you are as foolish as your co-worker.

Wiki has it all....

[Himring]

No other encyclopedia or would-be encyclopedia covers as many topics as Wikipedia. I've used it to do everything from research SOX regulations for my job, to understanding my favorite online game, DoTA to name it. And they even have a page on mail order brides. Not that I've ever looked into that (god they're hot, and they all have the same name, Elena...).

Re:Wiki has it all....

[omeg]

Unfortunately, some branches of Wikipedia are underdeveloped. Food, for example; there are only a bunch of ridiculously small articles about food. Take Fish (food), for instance, which is just barely over stub length. In fact, it should probably BE a stub as it is right now.

To me personally, it would seem a lot more important to have than Lightsaber combat...

Question...

[LeonGeeste]

It'd be nice if I could know what the **** I'm correcting. Where is the list of errors to assure that they are in fact errors? What source did they use to confirm that they are errors? How do they know that source wasn't error-ridden? All I see in TFA is a list a two mistakes on the Mendeleev (sp) article. Why won't they let us confirm the error rate?

Oh, and by the way guys -- yes, adding fluff to an article would decrease the error rate, questioning the use of that statistic. But unless you have reason to believe that the fluff is substantially different between WP and EB, the statistic is much more useful than many of you are making it out to be.

Math articles

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a math student, and I use Wikipedia mainly for its math articles, and what I've seen is very good. It's much better than many encyclopedias, which can give pretty shallow articles on technical subjects.

How are they quantifying "error"?

[kalidasa]

If the Britannica article misspells 2 words, and the Wikipedia article is based upon an assumption that light travels through the medium of ether, does that mean that Wikipedia has half as many errors as Britannica? This is a lot more complicated than the kind of statistical error analysis these folks are trying for.

Re:How are they quantifying "error"?

[Raul654]

They had a seperate category for egregious errors like the latter - of which, (from TFA) 4 were found in Wikipedia and 4 in Britannica

Re:How are they quantifying "error"?

[iapetus]

That's quite unlikely. Wikipedia has an entirely separate article about how light travels through the medium of ether.

Re:How are they quantifying "error"?

[gd23ka]

Ummm... actually we're not done yet exploring the ether
assumption...

Re:How are they quantifying "error"?

[Secrity]

The Wikipedia article about Aether theory has been properly marked as being an obsolete theory, as has the article about Phlogiston theory. The article on Intelligent Design indicates properly indicates that it is not a valid scientific theory. The Wikipedia also has several articles concerning obsolete theories. Are there any (properly marked) obsolete or not valid theories or articles concerning obsolete theories in the Encylopedia Britannica?

Re:How are they quantifying "error"?

[kalidasa]

But, again, they don't compare the kinds of egregious errors, do they?

Re:How are they quantifying "error"?

[EvanED]

Are there any (properly marked) obsolete or not valid theories or articles concerning obsolete theories in the Encylopedia Britannica?

Sure. It has entries for both the ether and phlogiston, under those names. In both cases it says the theory has been disproved, though not immediately at the start of the article like in Wikipedia.

(This is based on the online version)

Methodology questions

[jamescford]

I wonder a little bit about the methodology. From the linked summary, it seems that the comaparison is based on a count of errors in individual articles -- fine. However, the description of how the data were arrived at indicates reviewers wrote reviews, and then editors counted errors based on them:

Each pair of entries was sent to an expert for peer review. The reviewers, who were not told which article was which, were asked to look for three types of inaccuracy: factual errors, critical omissions and misleading statements. A total of 42 useable reviews were returned. These were examined by Nature's news reporters, who tallied the total inaccuracies for each entry.

My question is, were the reviewers also blinded to which was which? Deciding how many errors to count for a written review seems highly subjective. Also, how did they decide which reviews were "useable", and how many were rejected?

Re:Methodology questions

[gusmao]

Actually, there is many more questions about the methodology. First off, is a number of 42 articles representative of the universe of all articles in both encyclopaedias? For what I know, there are millions of articles in them, 42 random articles seems to be a rather small sample.

Moreover, what is the standard deviation and mean? Maybe on average, wikipedia has less errors, but a wikipedia article may contain so many errors that it becomes worthless. That's a piece of information I'd like to see.

Finally, there should be some sort of quality rating for the articles. A small uninformative article with no errors is much worse than a big article with lots of information but some inconsistencies.

Re:Methodology questions

[dogwelder99]

I'd like to see stdev and mean values as well. And, since they're measuring the count of verifiable statements of fact that were judged false, it would be interesting to see a count of facts that were judged accurate. That would be a better measure than "errors per kilobyte" and add a whole new dimension to the findings.

The problem

[squoozer]

The problem on wikipedia is not with the big articles that a lot of people read it's with the fringe articles. In Britanica the less referenced articles generally have a comparable accuracy with the highly referenced articles. On wikipedia, it is my experience, that the less well read articles can be highly inaccurate and reflect the authors view.

Did ANYONE RTFA?

[hkhito]

Slashdot summary: 42 articles compared, but Oh! Wiki is 2.6 times longer on average.
TFA (first paragraph on the page): 50 articles compared, and articles selected with very similar lengths, and some material removed (e.g. references) if necessary to make them same lengths.

Re:Did ANYONE RTFA?

[julesh]

Slashdot summary: 42 articles compared, but Oh! Wiki is 2.6 times longer on average.
TFA (first paragraph on the page): 50 articles compared, and articles selected with very similar lengths, and some material removed (e.g. references) if necessary to make them same lengths.

Read both articles fully. Nature sent 50 articles out to reviewers, but only got 42 back. They say they selected articles with "comparable" lengths, but there's a table on the wikipedia response page with a comparison of the sizes of the article, which is where the 2.6 figure comes from. It looks like they've done their research reasonably well to come up with that figure.

I challenge an assumption

[benhocking]

You (and implictly the submitter) are assuming longer == more content. Typically, better writers can say more with less words. Of course, more credentialed != better.

Re:I challenge an assumption

[Dun Malg]

You (and implictly the submitter) are assuming longer == more content. Typically, better writers can say more with less words.

You are assuming that in this case "fewer words" necessarily means "more concise" rather than possibly "less information". Unless someone here examines the articles in question, this argument is pointless.

Re:I challenge an assumption

[mrogers]

Unless someone here examines the articles in question, this argument is pointless.

What an accurate and concise summary of Slashdot - you should work for Wikipedia.

Re:I challenge an assumption

[orgelspieler]

Length vs. content was brought up in the Wiki article. Basically the idea was that Wikipedia has inefficient (nonexistant) copyediting, and consequently it fits less information in more words. They called it "filler." Also brought up was the fact that WP and EB split up their articles in different manners, so there's really no way to be sure that comparable information, length, and errors are being measured, just because the articles are titled the same thing. Basically, this has about the same scientific weight as a Slashdot poll.

Back to what you said though, since more credentialed != better, you end up with an interesting situation with a "real" encyclopedia. You have experts that write on a topic, and they pass that on to a copyeditor who may or may not be an expert in the field. Her job is to make the article more efficient; she is the "better" writer you are talking about. Unfortunately, even the best editors make mistakes. (IANA encyclopedia author/editor, so anybody with more info please correct me.) Now with Wikipedia, you often end up with the opposite, where a non expert will get the stub started, and self-declared experts later fill in the blanks. So my guess is that even though the number of errors is comparable, they get introduced to the articles in different manners.

Re:I challenge an assumption

[iocat]

But... this is the slashdot comments section. If we required arguments to be based in fact, or backed up with links to legitimate sources (that is, not wikipedia), where would we be?

Anyway, while Wikipedia may have fewer errors per word, it is possible to say that EB is probably written more concisely, and therefore may have a greater fact density per word, rendering the comparsion invalid.

More importantly, though, I want to know about the QUALITY of the errors. Are the Wiki erros typos, and the EB errors the result of new data not being incorporated fast enough into the books? Or are the Wiki errors pointless political tangents, while the EB errors tend towards not always crediting everyone involved in a discovery. Just saying "errors" doesn't really give a good enough analysis, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Re:I challenge an assumption

[iocat]

IWAE (I was an editor) and I can say that when writing about a technical subject, it's rare to find a copy-editor (proof reader) who is as technically knowledgeable (for a variety of reasons). This inevitably results in small errors -- and sometimes large ones -- entering the text, as the copy editor tries to make the orginal text flow more in line with the english language, hit certain word counts, avoid widows and orphans, etc. If the author, or a technical editor, doesn't have time to carefully reread the text (which is almost always the case), you end up with errors.

This isn't just a problem with encyclopaedias, of course. Most PhD dissertations are riddled with errors, some very obvious, even though the author may have spent years on the document. (I mean errors that result from trying to convey information, not intentionally included wrong information -- missing words that change the meaning of a sentence to the opposite of what the author intended, dates the contradict other dates on the same page, etc.) The world's an imperfect place.

Re:I challenge an assumption

[shotfeel]

There's also one other strength of Wikipedia that often gets ignored -links. This makes it an even better starting point than a print dictionary in that more authoritative and in-depth information on anything from the definition of a word to a complex theory is often only a click away.

IOW its not just the information provided, its the linking to more information -something the web was designed for.

Re:I challenge an assumption

[sylvainhamel]

Considering the nature of Wikipedia, he does work for Wikipedia.

Re:I challenge an assumption

[Anonymous Coward]

Typically, better writers can say more with less words.

No. Typically, better writers can say more with fewer words.

Steve Ditko is a chaos magician!

[gad_zuki!]

>it should be the number of errors per article.

It also should be weighed on the severity of the error. I mean, you won't hear that Steve Ditko is a "chaos magician" in Britnannica or that random newspaper editors had a role in both Kennedy assisinations. I'd also would like to see a study on bias. The wikipedia people work hard to get a clean POV, but you have the problem of motivation. The people most motivated to edit GWB's bio page (or any semi-controversial figure) are either going to be loud-mouth supporters or loud-mouth detractors. Sometimes when I browse the wikipedia I find some serious bias, edit it, and find that the motivated biased person just goes back and re-edits it. That's a great demotivator. People who put in time to make it work just get editied out by the nuts with too much free time on their hands.

Even Wales says there's going to be changes to stop such free and open-editing. Hopefully, these problems are just growing pains for one of the coolest projects on the web.

Theoretically, yes

[sterno]

The assumption there would be that one was deliberately attempting to reduce the statistical error rate. But given that the articles in question were chosen at random, it seems rather unlikely that this was the case. I don't think anybody is bored enough to go through and add fluff to articles just to bump up their accuracy stats.

Having said that this gets down to the quantitative versus qualitative measures. Does less errors and a greater volume reflect a more carefully written and considered article? Or does it reflect a lack of depth which makes itself less prone to errors.

The only theoretical drawback to Wikipedia is that anybody could write an article and thus may not be informed on the subject, or may have biases. Having said that, there's no reason that the same cannot be said of a printed encyclopedia. Furthermore, in the case of a printed one, there's no feedback or correction mechanism. So even that drawback isn't as big of a deal, and an awareness of that possibility gets you more into the mindset of double checking the facts, which is a good thing.

Frankly though my favorite thing about wikipedia is the version control. I saw some people talking about a political conspiracy the other day that sounded brand new. I went to Wikipedia and it had thorough documentation of the issue. When I looked at the revisions, I discovered that the original information they had went back to 2003 at least. So it's nothing new.

Re:Theoretically, yes

[bloodredsun]

Not really random but a subset of the whole group, namely they chose science articles. Science articles are easier to mark true or false so you can understand why the researchers choose them, but also these are the easiest articles to write as you can base your article on a series of established facts.

Re:Theoretically, yes

[wnknisely]

It's a pretty poor excuse for random choice if all your articles come from one area of interest. It's not all surprising that Wikipedia has decent information in its scientific articles. Most of us who use it, use it for that sort of information. But I'd be more impressed if the article on the rise of cuniform writing in Summaria (to pick an example) was of the same quality as the one in the Britannica.

The Wikipedia is a great example of the strength of Open Source collaboration - if you have an "itch", you can "scratch it". But it's also a example of the failings - there is little discipline to make sure that all the parts are of equal quality. Seems to me that most sucessful "open source" projects eventually develop some strict contributor quidelines and ethos as they mature. (Or someone is appointed Uber-editor of the collaboration.) I guess that's what's starting to happen with Wikipedia as well.

But did these experts fix them?

[MasterC]

Nature did these peer reviews and, presumably, paid them for their time, but did they bother fixing the errors?

I see Danny fixed the Mendeleev-was-the-13th-child error yesterday (and I don't think he's a Nature editor) so it appears Nature spent the money on expert input but didn't utilize that information (though that's one out of 163 errors).

What I really would like to have seen in this comparison is words per error.

Another interesting thing is that wikipedia has more articles (of the list) with no errors found: 4 vs. 2.

+5 Insightful

[TuringTest]

Parent post nails the core of what should be the real debate here.

Very nice.

[blair1q]

I get 33% more errors, it takes me 160% more time, and random lusers on the Internet say it's a good thing...

Not only that...

[brian0918]

There is also some question about how Nature arrived at their article lengths. On the page listing the articles in question, they claim, "All entries were chosen to be approximately the same length in both encyclopaedias. In a small number of cases some material, such as reference lists, was removed to make the lengths of the entries more similar." However, if you look at the examples they used, in some cases it seems impossible for them to have arrived at similar lengths for an article.

For example, their smallest article, on Robert Burns Woodward, weighs in at just over 200 bytes, versus Wikipedia's 13.5 KB (this number doesn't include any "wikicode", or tables, external links, reference sections, etc). How could they have made such drastically different articles to be of similar lengths? Another example is the West Nile Virus article (WP's is over 5x the length of EB's).

It would seem that they either averaged all the lengths together, and compared those numbers, or they purposely trimmed content from the Wikipedia entries. This is not necessarily a good idea, since we're talking about science articles. The "lead section" text might provide an oversummarization to keep the section short (eg: electrons orbit a nucleus in a similar way to how planets orbit the Sun), while the rest of the text explains in detail what actual occurs.

So, there is some amount of ambiguity there, more than I would expect from a scientific journal.

The Major Issue with all Wikipedia Discussions..

[eno2001]

The one problem I see with most of the discussions about Wikipedia is that they all focus on authority+profit rather than the social impact of free access to fairly decent information. I would argue that society would be better off if anyone could gain reasonable access to information at no charge with no requirement for membership or any kind of exclusivity vs. the financial interests of various encyclopedia companies being preserved. What "gaming" of the system that does take place in terms of intentional errors/omissions/"slander" is not likely to affect anyone who really matters. Traditional encyclopedias CAN compete if thet do the following:

1. Open their content for free distribution to the entire world
2. Form a cooperation between the so-called "experts" (a term I have great hatred for) and the end-users so that user edits are checked byt these so-called authorities
3. Realize that the only reason information of this kind should be compiled is to make the world a better place and not to make money

Remember, it's not the shareholders who matter, but the average person anywhere on the globe. At least that's the way things SHOULD be.

what about now?

[krappie]

The real question is.. did the experts reviewing the articles click "edit this page" and correct the mistakes?

Either way, I'd like to see a repeat of the same test. They listed the articles they reviewed. Im sure the wikipedia articles are full of "0" errors now.

We can do better!

[Junior J. Junior III]

Come on, wikipedians! I know we can put more errors into our articles than that! We just need to work harder!

Can't we all just get along?

[typical]

Other than as a willy-waving metric, it seems that the error count in a tiny sampling of articles isn't useful at *all*.

I mean, it's pretty clear that both Britannica and Wikipedia are useful references. They have different strengths and weaknesses, but neither is gong to be unilaterally better.

Now, I personally use WP exclusively; It's available from anywhere with a web browser, it's free, it covers the sorts of things that I deal with frequently (tech, pop culture, people) and I'm a fan of the open source mentality. For my particular needs, WP is better suited. However, I don't see a need to claim that one is *better*. There are going to be WP articles that are *chock full* of errors on some points or link to sketchy sources, and there are going to be Britannica articles that just don't exist compared to WP or are simply outdated. It doesn't take people very long to figure out which is more appropriate to their uses, because aside from the initially surprising fact (to me, at least) that WP works and doesn't simply fall prey to vandalism, the strengths of the two aren't that hard to figure out. I'm not going to use WP as a primary source for a research paper, but it's going to be the very first reference that I turn to when I want an overview of a topic.

I think that WP still has some challenges to pass -- WP contains articles on specific *products*, which Britannica completely lacks, and at some point, marketers are going to start expressing interest in the ability to freely edit Wikipedia articles on their products. But people that claim that WP is not useful are so clearly demonstrated wrong by a short while of using WP that there isn't any point in even arguing the point. It would be like someone claiming that Google isn't useful because it can return results to pages that aren't peer-reviewed.

Right now, there's a lot of noise over the Seigenthaler incident, but that's a tiny ripple in a vast ocean -- people will find a way to solve problems like this (if not in WP, then in a competing, derived system), just because it's so useful to do so. Reputation systems, a second system that blocks admission of changes until someone reviews them, whatever. We haven't even scratched the surface of systems like this, and their value is clearly phenomenal. I have read far more history and computer science on WP than I've been motived to read about elsewhere for quite some time. I've looked up a number of things that I always wondered about (what "grunge" actually *is*, for example), because WP is so quick to access, so vast, and so readable.

The best thing about all this is that WP is something that nobody (or very few people, at least) were making noise about until recently. The Internet solves problems (communication, latency, ability to provide links to other content, ease of collaboration, access to everyone to try out new system ideas) that allow incredible new systems that have never existed before in humanity's existence, and the number of new (as of yet raw perhaps, unpolished) systems is *exploding*. Search engines are the only thing that was an immediate and obvious application to me when the Web came into being, and even the mechanisms of something like Google were certainly not obvious. In the past few years, we have seen ideas like del.icio.us, yahoo's bundle of services, free webmail, Wikipedia, and so forth come into being. What's even more incredible is that these things are *enabling* technologies. Each one is a tool that allows people to more easily communicate or deal with things, which makes us even *more* powerful and makes it even easier for us to make new tools. If I can freely collaborate without long-distance phone charges with people in Sweden, I expand the number of people that I can share knowledge with. If I can read, at least in a rudimentary fashion, the languages that I can read through use of Babelfish, I have hugely increased the number of documents available to me. If I can take advantage

Re:Can't we all just get along?

[jdavidb]

and at some point, marketers are going to start expressing interest in the ability to freely edit Wikipedia articles on their products.

You're new at Wikipedia, aren't you?

Re:Can't we all just get along?

[blair1q]

100% of Brittanica articles will be useful to someone unfamiliar with the topic.

Maybe 20% of Wikipedia articles fit that standard.

Failure modes

[fermion]

As in many things, I feel that failure modes are much more interesting than instances of success. One can have a process that is very succesful when working, but in the failrure mode is catastrophic, then the perhaps that is not such a good process. The focus on success instead means of failure is a big reason why we have so many bad processses, and is a key method to psuh really harmful things onto unsuspecting population.

The nice thing about britannica is that though it is imperfect, I have seen few cases of pervasive campaigns of misinformation. To avaoid this failure mode, an editor should require a writier to be broad and reference a variety of sources. Also, when we are taught to use the encyclopedia, we are taught not to use a a primary source, but merely as a starting point. For instance, few say that the encyclopedia says this or that.

OTOH, the failure mode of wikipedia is potentially catastophic. The winners are often those who have the power to to push thier persepctive of a particular topic. This is not always the case, but since it is a probably failure mode, and since there does not appear to be an effective defense, it makes the wikipedia a much less reliable source of information, on average, than the britannica.

In the end I think the summary is another example of sloppy science. It is not so bad, as it indicates that the wiki can be more or less trusted on the types of topics nature posted, although the wiki did have more erros, though perhaps not statistically significant. The wikipedia process absolutely has to deal with the failure modes, and should encourage authors to point to peer reviewed sources to justify their claims of science and history, and a variety of sources for current events. After all, if everything comes from the weekly world news, we cannot expect much overall accuracy.

Re:Failure modes

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

The nice thing about britannica is that though it is imperfect, I have seen few cases of pervasive campaigns of misinformation.

While I agree with much of your sentiment, I'm not sure I can agree with the above statement. Have you read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica? Wikipedia has so many more eyes on it, and from such a different audience than the encyclopedia Britiannica, I'm not sure that anecdotal evidence is really valid. For all I know, the Encyclopedia Britannica regularly engages in campaigns of misinformation, but due to their audience for that section, it has not been brought to my attention. Of course all of this just stresses the need to have multiple references and to validate the sources of information. As Wikipedia becomes more mainstream it will certainly require more moderation and versioning.

Multi-lang differences

[Malc]

It's informative, but sometimes you have to be able to speak more than one language. I recently had a PPPoE connection issue. I was trying to understand an Ethereal trace and the sequence of things (I wasn't getting a response to the PADI broadcasts, BTW). I couldn't find a whole lot of information on the web, and what RFCs I found I didn't like. Finally I found information on Wikipedia. However, the English PPPoE page is crap, but the German PPPoE page is actually pretty good. In some ways I was quite surprised that the English documentation for PPPoE was so bad.

It shouldn't matter that much

[Quiet_Desperation]

If you're doing any kind of information/knowledge search, you never rely on a single source anyway. Unless you're a journalist.

Re:It shouldn't matter that much

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny you should say that, because some newspapers are telling their reporters NOT to use Wikipedia.
http://poynter.org/forum/view_post.asp?id=10748

General item on journalists and Wikipedia: http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=32&aid=62126

But there is something else new

[pHatidic]

Here is another article that was published today saying that Wikipedia is funded by pornography. Or how about this article saying that Wikipedia is run by pedophiles!

Re:But there is something else new

[laughingcoyote]

Now THAT is some scary stuff-and I DON'T mean Wikipedia, I mean that pervertedjustice site.

From the top of the pervertedjustice article you linked:

Since they do not currently have their own website and because we believe the quality of this release is high, we have decided to post it on our PeeJ Opinions page.

Now, waaaaaay underneath it there, they have three "corrections"-which in effect state that the entire thing is wrong, that the three administrators accused in the article of having supported pro-pedophilia viewpoints have actually actively opposed them.

I can't possibly begin to take seriously any site or person that calls a piece with three -provably- factually incorrect, slanderous accusations "high quality". I'd sure hate to see "low quality". I hope all three of those admins sue for slander.

Re:But there is something else new

[koreaman]

So fucking what if there are pedophiles on Wikipedia? It's not like being a pedophile is somehow wrong. You can't change the fact that you're a pedophile. In fact, being a celibate pedophile in my opinion shows a remarkable level of self-control and should be commended.

I thought /. users were smarter than this...
Note: I am not a pedophile.

Just science - not anything else.

[artlogic]

I don't find this to be surprising because of the comparison criteria. It's a well known fact that Wikipedia's science/technology articles are actually pretty accurate (most times). However most of the inaccuracy we've heard about in the past weeks has been in regards to social/cultural articles which were not compared.

If I want to learn about Haskell, or TCP/IP - I'll start at Wikipedia. If I want to learn about John Seigenthaler Sr. on the other hand...

Trust

[Shakes268]

Even though articles may be longer and that changes the ratio of errors per article Britannica, IMHO, is a much more trustworthy source of information. With Wikipedia you have no idea how factual a posters information may be. Sure there are alot of people editing the information but you might hit the article at a point in time in which the information is incorrect. An example is the fake posting made about the person having been investigated in the death of Kennedy. You really don't know who is posting these articles or making changes to them as they are anonymous. At least with Britannica you are assured that the information is gathered by people who get paid to do this as a job and the information is validated by fact checkers. Wikipedia is "cool" but still a novelty to me.

Re:Trust

[vidarh]

That's what the edit history, the discussion page for each entry, and critical thinking is for. At least the latter is something that this experiment shows you should apply with Britannica as well, and the two former aren't available with Britannica. That said, in any case you should look up primary sources before you rely on information in any encyclopedia for anything important.

At least with Britannica you are assured that the information is gathered by people who get paid to do this as a job and the information is validated by fact checkers

And this experiment demonstrated that despite that their error rate wasn't much better than Wikipedia for the science subjects chosen. So what is your point?

Re:Trust

[Shakes268]

My point is that the error rate within Wikipedia CAN and WILL change as contributors continously update and edit articles. This experiment was just on a few subjects but there are several news stories on Wikipedia "Graffiti".
Sure you can use the history to check what has been going on with the article however, with Britannica you don't have to! Why make things more difficult on yourself when doing research?
I agree that your sources should be looked up before relying on an encyclopedia however for children doing school reports the encyclopedia may be the primary source. Would they think to look at the edit history of the article? Would a 7th grader be such an expert on the subject that they could discern the "graffiti"?

Entries the same length...or not?

[telecsan]

Wikipedians claim the entries are longer, the study claims similar length.

FTFA - "All entries were chosen to be approximately the same length in both encyclopaedias. In a small number of cases some material, such as reference lists, was removed to make the lengths of the entries more similar."

Re:Entries the same length...or not?

[ultranova]

Wikipedians claim the entries are longer, the study claims similar length.

Incorrect. Your own quote says:

"All entries were chosen to be approximately the same length in both encyclopaedias."

In other words, the researchers chose articles that were the same length in Britannica and Wikipedia. Most articles could be longer in Wikipedia, or most articles could be longer in Britannica - but this quote says only that one criterion of being chosen for this study was that the article in question was approximately as long in both.

Re:Entries the same length...or not?

[geoffspear]

Yes, but you're assuming that the rate of errors per article remains constant when the lengths of the articles vary.

Even if you ignore the obvious bias of the people (identified as "Wikipedians") refuting the Nature study, you have to admit their methodology is flawed. If the original study properly controlled for the lngth of articles, you can't refute it by showing that articles they didn't study might vary in length.

Re:Entries the same length...or not?

[ultranova]

Yes, but you're assuming that the rate of errors per article remains constant when the lengths of the articles vary.

No I'm not. My post didn't mention error rate at all. It only commented on the parent posts claims about what the article said.

Even if you ignore the obvious bias of the people (identified as "Wikipedians") refuting the Nature study, you have to admit their methodology is flawed. If the original study properly controlled for the lngth of articles, you can't refute it by showing that articles they didn't study might vary in length.

The OP claimed that the study claimed that the articles in Wikipedia are the same length than in Britannica, and gave a quote from the article. I pointed out that what the quote actually said is that the researches picked articles that happened to be the same length in both Wikipedia and Britannica. I haven't commented on the study itself, just what the OPs claims about it.

Given this, your reply simply doesn't make sense to me. Are you sure that you replied to the right post ?

Re:Entries the same length...or not?

[telecsan]

You are correct that the articles were chosen for similar length, but the pair of Wikipedians were saying that the studied articles were longer in Wikipedia vs. EB.

Both parties were looking at the same set of articles, and came to differing conclusions on the comparison of length.

Introducing Uncyclopedia

[DesiStud]

A ground-breaking study by XYZ inc. found Uncyclopedia having error rate -10% times more than Wikipedia. And the length of formers articles are on an average 1.25 times lengthier than wikipedia What a holy shit of comparison is it??? How do you compare free and open wikipedia with closed and economically-sucking britannica. Isn't very similar to comparing wikipedia and uncyclopedia.

Re:Introducing Uncyclopedia

[Anonymous Coward]

Fantastic. You've just proven most of the points against Wikipedia, if only because the majority of Wikipedia users write just like you (i.e., incoherently).

Participation

[shaitand]

Did the experts correct the errors? I hope so.

Re:Participation

[IdahoEv]

RTFA: it was a blind review. The experts were given printouts of the text of both articles, and weren't told what the source was.

Re:Participation

[shadowbearer]

But that's sort of ridiculous.

  If they really were experts, I'd hope they'd be able to tell the difference even just from plaintext. If nothing else, just the less condensed nature of nearly all wikipedia articles, and the often somewhat non-grammatical nature of the link names, should tell them that it's not a mainstream printed encyclopedia.

  The huge differences in writing styles (with)in a Wikipedia vs. the more formalized nature of nearly all encyclopedias would also be a huge hint, I'd think.

  I mean, any "expert" who could evaluate them fairly would have to be familiar with both, right?

  Besides which, and this is something I've been thinking about since Wikipedia started showing up more in the news criticisms lately - just HOW can the two be compared? There's such a huge difference between the evolutional processes of the two that they are apples and oranges. Comparing them is like trying to compare an attempt at a complete human genome printed in a dead-tree format, vs. the gestalt of the knowledge of genetic researchers. It just can't be done in any really meaningful manner. Ok, that was probably a poor analogy, but it's true that no paper-printed media can match the information potentially available over the internet. Bits are cheap, paper and ink ain't. Times, a'changing.

SB

About the "class action lawsuit"....

[brian0918]

The parent referred to this site, which states that the group is gathering complaints to file a class action lawsuit against Wikipedia.

The problem? The people hosting the site are far from unbiased on the topic. The site is hosted by baou.com, which runs QuakeAID, a bogus "charity" set up after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake.

Why are they mad at Wikipedia? After the earthquake, a member of QuakeAID with the username Baoutrust used Wikipedia to promote the QuakeAID article and the QuakeAID website. Apparently, this included listing QuakeAID on the list of charities for the tsunami survivors. When their true nature was discovered, they were removed from the list, and they got pissed. Since then, they've been smearing Wikipedia at every possible chance.

Re:About the "class action lawsuit"....

[drewzhrodague]

Thank you for clarifying, and posting the links!

Re:About the "class action lawsuit"....

[kelnos]

Meh, ridiculous. Wikipedia should trademark their puzzle-piece sphere logo and sue the wikipediaclassaction.org people. That would be pretty amusing.

Bullshit

[Raul654]

"Britannica is authored by an entity which takes responsibility for its errors and has a long history of accuracy. Its content is "vetted", meaning that there is a measure of academic validity to what was written. "

Oh really?

"The services and all information, products, and other content included in or accesible from the services are provided 'as is' and without warranties of any kind (express, implied, and statutotory, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose), all of wihch Britannica expressely disclaims to the fullest extent possible" - Britannica's terms of use

You were saying?

Part of the Problem

[Rydia]

Part of the problem with this study is its subject matter; science-related articles are by and large cut and dry, and only common misconceptions usually are introduced. While one could say this exonerates wikipedia, I'm pretty sure this doesn't say a whole lot. Another problem is that they consider an "omission" an inaccuracy. That doesn't seem like a good standard to hold either publication to.

What about biographies, the pieces more often cited as innacurate? Or political pieces? Or any subject that has any controversy, really.

While it's nice to see that wikipedia is only slightly worse off in science, as the article said, it's still in general poorly written and still contains more errors than brittanica in the least error-prone subject. Hardly a vote of confidence.

Britannica quality is in writing

[adorai]

Having just bought a Britannica for the princely sum of $50 a month ago, I can say without question that its superiority is not in its accuracy (most mistakes in it would go undetected by me), but in the quality of the writing. Just pull up the article on "Children's Literature" if you want to compare; the Britannica is full of the sardonic wit that makes it enjoyable to read for 2 hours, while Wikipedia is best for scrounging up information when I need it. It seems as though one of the key reasons for this is that Britannica is willing to take a position on many issues, such as "Bostonians are incorrigible jaywalkers," while this would violate Wikipedia NPOV and would probably be replaced with a table of jaywalking prevalence in major American cities.

Re:Britannica quality is in writing

[egomaniac]

It seems as though one of the key reasons for this is that Britannica is willing to take a position on many issues, such as "Bostonians are incorrigible jaywalkers," while this would violate Wikipedia NPOV and would probably be replaced with a table of jaywalking prevalence in major American cities.

And you know what? The table of jaywalking prevalence would be a hell of a lot more useful. They wouldn't just be taking an unsupported stand, but rather showing where they drew their conclusion from and allowing me to make my own judgments.

Wikipedia focuses on NPOV for a very good reason. It's perfectly okay to talk about Bostonians jaywalking more than anybody else as long as you cite evidence supporting it and make it a simple statement of fact rather than an antagonistic assertion.

Re:Britannica quality is in writing

[adorai]

ahh...exactly! The table of jaywalking prevalence would be much more useful, if you are trying to learn about jaywalking. If you are trying to learn about Boston, instead of being sidetracked by a table of numbers, sometime a sentence is more appropriate.

Wikipedia needs a disclaimer

[wrook]

I was thinking something like:

In many of the more relaxed areas of the Internet, Wikipedia has long supplanted the great Encyclopedia Britanica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older more pedestrian work in two important respects.

First, it is slightly cheaper, and secondly it has the words Don't Panic! printed in large friendly letters on its cover.

Well, OK... except for the Don't Panic part...

Re:Wikipedia needs a disclaimer

[swid27]

Luckily enough, Slate has already provided one for us:

Wikipedia is a real-life Hitchhiker's Guide: huge, nerdy, and imprecise

Re:Wikipedia needs a disclaimer

[babtras]

So that's why they chose to review 42 articles rather than 50?

Comparable length entries were judged

[Acy James Stapp]

From the results page at http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/multimedia/ 438900a_m1.html

"All entries were chosen to be approximately the same length in both encyclopaedias."

Are you all idiots? I guess I don't really need to ask that question.

Re:Comparable length entries were judged

[julesh]

Read the discussion on wikipedia. While they were described as "comparable" in the nature article, the wikipedia articles were, on average, 2.5 times as long as the britannica equivalents.

But note that...

[jonadab]

# Of course, this doesn't mean that our articles are
# necessarily better; it depends on the severity of the
# problems, whether our extra words are actually useful
# information or just verbiage/trivia, etcetera. There's
# also the question of when, exactly the articles were
# reviewed.

This quote is from the same source as the average article lengths, and it's good to see this admission. It's encouraging that the Wikipedians who did this length comparison acknowledge that length isn't necessarily everything.

On the other hand, Brittanica may be deliberately edited for terseness, to reduce costs of things like printing, shipping, warehousing, and so on. Brevity can be a virtue, but on the other hand it also isn't everything.

Still, interesting to see the comparison.

No shit

[everphilski]

He was talking about the print edition, not the web edition. No shit they aren't gonna guarantee the website - they have RSS feeds from other sites, etc. They can't guarantee content they can't control. The print edition on the other hand does carry a level of academic credibility and is vetted.

-everphilski-

Encyclopedia Britannica is much worse.

[Futurepower(R)]

I compared the information about Barbara McClintock, the Nobel Prize winner, in the Encyclopedia Britannica with that found elsewhere on the Internet.

The Encyclopedia Britannica article was not inaccurate. It was, however, extremely misleading. It was worse than worthless, since it gave the idea that Barbara McClintock's achievements were much less valuable and extensive than they actually are. After many years and much progress in Biology, her work is still valuable. A copy of her papers requires 80 feet of shelf space!

The Wikipedia article is far, far better than the one in the full Encyclopedia Britannica.

No space-limited, profit-oriented publication can compare to internet research, for most topics. I don't think that Encyclopedia Britannica has anything against Barbara McClintock, but the company must decide how much paper they want to buy.

Yes, you can.

[brian0918]

You can cite any past version of an article by going to the History tab and clicking on a date for an edit. That will add an "old revision ID" to the URL of the page, and that ID will never change.

Longer is better

[Bastardchyld]

I have ex-girlfriends who think that longer is better. Something tells me they were not talking about wikipedia articles.

3 types of inaccuracy

[kgroves]

The reviewers ... look for ... three types of inaccuracy: factual errors, critical omissions and misleading statements.

Having a longer document with more omissions is nothing to be proud of.

Hahahah

[Darkman, Walkin Dude]

You sir have just exposed why wikipedia will never ever supplant the Encyclopedia Brittanica... Take a look at this gem here...

Of course the European assembly is concerned about these women. Mail order brides expose European men for what they are; abusive, unemployed alcoholics. Therefore, they resort to lying about the conditions these women face. It is a well known fact that American men are more faithful and make better husbands than European men. The mail order bride business is actually proof of this. No one forces a woman to become a mail order bride; they freely choose the opportunity to get away from their abusive European men. At a typical matrriage agency social, there are 20 women for every man.

And an American man is always able to meet women in bars, clubs and even on the street who is more than happy jump at the chance to date him. An American man can walk up to a woman in St. Petersburg, Russia and ask for a date and almost every time she will accept. It is no wonder that European men are so afraid of the American man and makes up lies about "consumer husbands". Regardless of these lies, more women than ever are becoming mail order brides because they know the truth from their friends.

lollers...

What's with the wikipedia bashing lately?

[porkThreeWays]

I think everyone is quick to bash wikipedia for it's nature, but the parent poster hits it right on the head though. I can't think of a single place on the internet to get more information than wikipedia. Where else am I going to find detailed articles of the t-virus and bird flu on the same site? Everyone's been so quick to bash wikipedia lately, but give me something better and I'll use it. What are my alternatives? Use google and get my info from a site that could have false information as well? At least I can correct errors on wikipedia. If I read information on an angelfire site I know to be false, what can I do about it?

Don't forget the free pron

[myth24601]

Using Wiki is also like a porn lottery. You never know when you will hit an article that has been turned into a porn page.

Why just science articles?

[ThinkFr33ly]

Seems to me that science articles might not be the place category of articles to use to judge the accuracy of Wikipedia. I suspect that most people contributing to the science articles have a pretty good knowledge of the subjects in question... they're not things that most people know a lot about. Acheulean industry? Kinetic isotope effect? Meliaceae? Huh?

Where I suspect more errors abound in wikipedia is in the articles about things that a lot of people think they know a lot about, but in fact don't have any idea what they're talking about. Or topics in which people have a vested interest in misinforming people. (Political topics, for example.)

Honestly, a better comparison would have been a sampling of 100 or so randomly selected entries. Confining it to just science articles seems like an attempt to misrepresent the accuracy of wikipedia.

Re:Why just science articles?

[insignificant1]

I agree that sampling a broader range of articles would be more representative of the entire encyclopedia, but I disagree that this is an attempt to misrepresent the accuracy of Wikipedia (they say they just look at science articles; they make no claims beyond that).

The research was done by Nature magazine after all, and so they assessed what is most interesting to them, and what they have expertise in. They did their part in verifying the accuracy of (or probably more precisely giving credence to) Wikipedia science articles, and should be commended for the exercise; I doubt that they are playing the role of spin doctors here. That's what the other people are doing, taking the study for something it is not and does not claim to be.

Re:Why just science articles?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I wouldn't rely on Wikipedia for anything other than hard science and perhaps objective time and dates history. These things can be definitively fact checked (but probably aren't). Wikipedia has a real problem with it's editorial voice taking sides in unresolved debates.

Re:Why just science articles?

[dvdeug]

It is the best category of articles to use to judge the accuracy of Wikipedia on science. That's a reasonable question to ask, especially for a journal of science.

Have you ever actually checked Wikipedia and judged the quality for yourself? Personally, I suspect our articles on John Kerry and Mother Teresa, for example, are among the best in the world, having been produced by a process that encourages a neutral point of view and having every fact and accusation been fought over by both sides.

Re:Why just science articles?

[ThinkFr33ly]

Considering me personally checking articles for accuracy is not a valid way of concluding anything about the accuracy of Wikipedia as a whole, no I have not.

As far as your conclusions, they are flawed. What about the process encourages neutral points of view? Simply because anybody can contribute? This assumes quite a bit about the demographics of the people using Wikipedia. It also assumes that intentional lies are caught more often than they are missed.

Many of the same unsupported assertions used to trumpted certain aspects of open source are made when defending Wikipedia. Just because more eyes can catch and correct mistakes does not mean that they actually do. Add to that the fact that there is basically nobody responsible for the content (unlike Britannica, which could be sued for knowingly publishing lies in one of its articles), I think people using Wikipedia as a resource need to be that much more careful.

Re:Why just science articles?

[dvdeug]

Is this how you treat restaraunts, too? I've never eaten there, but you're wrong about their food being any good? The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Neutral point of view is encouraged by Wikipedia. It is a formal rule, and those who do not follow it can be sanctioned. It's really irrelevant how it's achieved; what matters is that it is achieved, and it is a triumph of philosophy over science and reality to say that it isn't without actually having looked.

I've read the Mother Teresa article, and find it to be a detailed balanced look at the issue, and I've watched the history and have seen that there are people who will fix any errors added. It is one thing to look at these articles and disagree with me, but to call my conclusions flawed without even looking at the articles is absurd.

What matters is whether it works or not. All the theory in the world can only tell you why it does or doesn't.

Re:Why just science articles?

[dvdeug]

Does Wikipedia have more of a problem with the editorial voice taking sides than other encyclopedias? I'd be surprised if it does.

Re:Why just science articles?

[ThinkFr33ly]

Reading a handful of articles and saying "ya that looks good" is not a valid way of judging Wikipedia as a whole.

Your restaraunt analogy is flawed. A better analogy would be that one can conclude that the majority of restaraunts in Boston are good because I've been to two of them and they were good.

Nobody seems to want to bother to back up their claims with facts. Is it not possible that Wikipedia, while being a very interesting experiment, just doesn't work very well as far as ensuring accuracy?

I'm not claiming to know that Wikipedia is less accurate than any other encyclopedia. I'm simply saying that only sampling science articles isn't telling us what we need to know to judge it properly.

Re:Why just science articles?

[dvdeug]

Most people don't go to a resteraunt and edit the whole menu; they try one or two items and make their judgement from that. A formal randomly-sampled experiment is complex; people make judgements based on examination of a few items all the time.

I've backed up my claims with facts, as has Nature. Just because you didn't like them, doesn't mean they aren't backed up. It's a little absurd to claim that because no one is running out and offering results of a formal study, that it's all right to toss unfounded accusations against Wikipedia.

A sampling of science articles tells us about the science articles. That is a proper subject to judge an encyclopedia on. Not every study covers the entire world, nor should it.

Re:Why just science articles?

[ThinkFr33ly]

A formal randomly-sampled experiment is complex; people make judgements based on examination of a few items all the time.

A these people would be wrong it concluding that all the items on the menu are as high quality as the one they had. Just because most people make invalid conclusions doesn't all of a sudden make them valid!

I've backed up my claims with facts, as has Nature

You've backed up absolutely nothing, and the whole point of my post was to show that Nature's methods only allow us to conclude something about science articles on Wikipedia, not the accuracy of Wikipedia in general.

A sampling of science articles tells us about the science articles. That is a proper subject to judge an encyclopedia on. Not every study covers the entire world, nor should it.

I disagree, and I've provided reasons for my disagreement as well as links supporting my conclusions. People are concluding things about the quality of Wikipedia in general from a study that can only tell us about science articles. Studies obviously have built in limits to their scope. This is built in by how large of a sampling size they choose, what they chose to sample, etc.

Re:Why just science articles?

[dvdeug]

Do you really work your way through the whole menu on a resteraunt, when you don't like anything you've had? They're not invalid conclusions; they're conclusions made in real life with the tools we have, and they work well enough. What's not valid is to argue from pure reason, without having ever set foot inside the resteraunt. You've provided reasons without evidence; you have no right to criticize those who have worked from evidence, even if they haven't performed a scientific study.

Re:Why just science articles?

[ThinkFr33ly]

I honestly don't understand much of your previous post.

You've provided reasons without evidence

No, I've both provided evidence of intentional misinformation in wikipedia that was not caught by the editing system, as well as pointing out logical flaws in the conclusions made by people referencing the Nature study.

you have no right to criticize those who have worked from evidence, even if they haven't performed a scientific study.

I have every right. You don't get to make sweeping generalizations based on person experience. This is illogical and unscientific and I have every right to criticize it. Who the hell are you to tell me what I can and cannot criticize?

Accuracy not an issue with non-controversial topic

[wcrowe]

In fact, accuracy is not really so much the problem as objectivity. With a non controversial topic, such as the scientific topics mentioned, Wikipedia's accuracy is quite good (it would be hard to "spin" gallium, say). And the level of detail you can get with a Wikipedia article can sometimes be overwhelming.

OTOH, when you get into topics that are controversial, most of the people who are driven to write about it feel passionately about the topic one way or another. In this way, objectivity flies out the window, and it is possible for inaccuracies to abound.

It is wrong to make blanket statements concerning Wikipedia's accuracy. Like information on the WWW in general, sometimes it is very accurate, sometimes it is not. Either way, you have to be amazed at how exhaustive it can be... something Britannica will never achieve.

In our current zeitgeist of moral relativism I am surprised that so many people are up in arms over the accuracy of Wikipedia articles.

Works both ways

[geeber]

Sure they found errors in Wikipedia and Britannica, but which one can you go back to and correct?

Which one can I go back and introduce deliberate errors?

=rand

[PhYrE2k2]

Just go into work and type =rand(25,25) on a blank line and press enter. My error rate is next to nill, but my content is just a lot of gibberish about foxes.

-M

correction

[PhYrE2k2]

work = Microsoft Word.
Wow- And on a post about error rates too...

But did they correct?

[matt me]

Did those experts having found those errors correct them? If not, why not? What Wikipedia needs is more expert contributors. I can add a little to articles I'm researching, but what is most helpful is when someone who knows more than most about a subject can work on those articles.

i like wikipedia very much ...

[kylie69]

... and it's the first place i search for something i want to know more about. But i find it hard to imagine how an encyclopedia written by specialists only, like britannica could, have more errors in square page than wikipedia.

Irrelevant to the real problem...

[Lodragandraoidh]

I find it deplorable that both Wikipedia, and Britannica have errors in their content - similar enough to be almost identical (3 vs. 4 --- not a shining win for Britannica by any means). I also question the metrics involved; why didn't they look at the total number of articles in various categories to get a feel for the breadth of both sources, as well as other things. An accurate picture does not revolve around one measurement - unless you are trying to lie to yourself and others. So this 'scientific' test is meaningless - and does not shine light on the real problem.

The real problem is that information, be it scientific, historic, biographic or otherwise is always subject to interpretation - and whether intentionally through some agenda, or accidentally through an error, inaccuracies creep in over time.

We are better equipped to deal with this issue today with technologies that allow the preservation of information over longer periods of time. Nevertheless we have one thing that will always be a limitation no matter what system we use: human beings. Over time information degrades as it is copied from one medium to another because of human failings. The sheer volume of information makes it difficult to have exacting controls over this process.

In the end this result just tells me that wikipedia is sufficient as a resource - on par with traditional encyclopedias. Furthermore wikipedia has articles that I don't find in traditional encyclopedias, and adds articles as events unfold - making it more timely and desireable to me as a resource than 'frozen' encyclopedias (whether traditional paper or cdrom formats).

What would sell me on going with traditional encyclopedias again would be for them to realize that technology is changing, and for them to produce enhancments of the online encyclopedias (like Wikipedia) by leveraging their talented researches to validate factual information - rather than trying to do the whole thing themselves; a 'google' of online encyclopedias, if you will.

Of course, they won't be able to make as much money as they used to with the tradition methods - and they will have to change how they are paid for those services - but that is a fact of life with the internet - the same things we are seeing happening in the software industry (Windows vs. Linux), in the bookselling arena (Amazon.com vs. brick and mortar retailers), and other markets are happening in the encyclopedia market. No amount of gnashing of teeth and pointing of fingers is going to change that.

Ultimately it is up to each of us to verify the facts - particularly if we are depending upon them for our livelyhood (going around with wrong-headed ideas is not appealing to me in any case - but many folks are not so discerning and will believe the wildest ideas). Encyclopedias merely scratch the surface - and can't be trusted as definitive. Only through our own trials and research can we be sure that all of the evidence for any subject points to a certain conclusion, and some things may never be known with any amount of certainty. You can only know what is knowable - everything else is up to interpretation. That may seem counterintuitive but nature is full of contradictions (take the duck-billed platypus, for example).

unlimited media

[globaljustin]

encyclopedias are meant to be concise and to the point

You're missing the boat completely. The internet has virtually unlimited storage space theoretically, there are no boundaries, being 'concise' is not longer necessary.

For example a civil war article. Wikipedia can have a 'concise and to the point' introduction to its civil war article, and then go into as much detail as it wants, linking to all known history and primary sources about the civil war and the era. Paper encyclopedias would do that if they could, but the 'civil war' article would end up taking up volumes itself. I agree that longer does not equal 'better' in any absolute sense, but longer USUALLY means more, and more is typically better when it comes to information.

OT

[Anonymous Coward]

yeahyeah, after 2.5-3 hrs of sleep, I got up today 3 hrs earlier than I have for 5 months, went and took a brain-frying final, came back to slashdot and did the obvious thing, tried to make a joke, but totally forgot to tip people off on the humor of it...

lol, that should teach me.
-fbartho

Re:OT

[StalinsNotDead]

Sorry about that. I'm humor impaired.

Researched???

[hellfire]

Exactly how does one research an article on goatse.cx? I don't mean what resources do you look up, I mean how does one stomach it? And how does one keep that from appearing on their tech writing resume?

"My latest wiki contributions include identifying the person who took the picture for goatse.cx."

Re:Researched???

[shadowbearer]

Publish under an anonymous pen name and drink large amounts of alcohol during the research? Well, the booze would help you forget... ;-)

  (Just reading the wiki entry about goatse is nore than I really wanted to know :)

SB

Wikipedia is free?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am enjoying the comments that compare Wikipedia being "free" and EB somehow not being free. To use Wikipedia, you need a computer and access to the internet. Those aren't exactly free. You can get free computer access at say, a library. They also have real sources at libraries, we call them books. Last I checked, you can also find real encyclopedias at libraries.

Granted you might have to leave your house to use a real source, but there is no such thing as a free lunch.

I challenge your challenge to my challenge

[benhocking]

You (and implictly the submitter) are assuming longer == more content. Typically, better writers can say more with less words.

You are assuming that in this case "fewer words" necessarily means "more concise" rather than possibly "less information".

I'm not sure what part of my argument leads you to assume that I am assuming what you claim I am assuming. However, I think that last sentence bolsters my point that more words does not necessarily lead to more clarity. Surely, fewer words can just mean less information. My point was just that good writers can make a point concisely. Admittedly, this is more by definition (of a good writer) than anything else.

I would not be surprised if the Wikipedia articles had more information than the Encylopedia articles. However, I doubt that number of "content units" tightly correlates with the number of words. So, the fact that 4/2.6

Huh?

[Grendel Drago]

Where does Wikipedia show up on PeeJ? I had to view it through Google's cache, since the site is fritzing for me right now, and I didn't see anything about Wikipedia there. (As for the porn comment, note that the Sylvia Saint article features a picture from Bomis's portal. Ah, history.)

Longer does not mean more information

[Jesus 2.0]

I would bet that if you gave the articles to two writing experts rather than two experts on the topic the articles are about, the Britannica articles would almost universally qualify as having better writing, better organization, less duplication, less tangentially related or even non-related discussion, and so forth.

Dupe

[figa]

For some reason yesterday's Slashback linked to an Australian paper's coverage of the Nature story rather than the Nature story itself.

Wikipedia's defense?

[UltimateRobotLover]

Never mind the quality, feel the weight!

Just had to nitpick...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a sucker for details, so...

Genghis Khan was reportedly irritable; he murdered his family after a lunchtime interruption. (13 words)

vs.

Ghenghis Khan was known to be highly grumpy and quick to anger, and because of this, he decided to make the move to murder his family when they interrupted his lunch. (31 words)

1. "reportedly" vs "known to be" - the first implies that the information was reported somewhere, the second implies it is a known fact.

2. "irritable" is close to, but not the exact same as, "highly grumpy and quick to anger". Irritable people are not necessarily grumpy, nor is the emotion they display always anger - it could just be annoyance.

3. "and because of this" implies that his temper was the cause of murdering his family and not merely related to it.

4. "decided to make the move" does not state that he actually succeeded.

5. "after a lunchtime interruption" vs. "when they interrupted his lunch" - the first doesn't tell the reader who interrupted his lunch (maybe it was his buddy and it made him go berzerk and he took it out on his family)

So, in general, sometimes the so-called "fluffing" actually adds content to the piece and thus isn't really fluff, even though only the more pedantic among us will notice.

Actually I think that works...

[sterno]

This is the thing, for any given body of information, the number of people interested in a subject will likely be proportional to the number of people willing to write about it at length. Realms of information that are particularly obscure won't get much treatment, but then again, will anybody be reading it. On the other hand, Wikipedia has two huge advantages when dealing with obscure topics:

1) If there are people with expertise out there, they can just add the information anytime they want to with ease. So there's very little barrier to keep even the most obscure topics from getting covered.

2) There's no practical limit on the amount of information that can be added because it's all on some big server.

My suspicion is that, going forward, independent foundations will work with Wikipedia to update the information on the more obscure topics. Let's say you're with the AASCR (The American Association of Sumarian Cunieform Researchers), and you want to make sure that the often misunderstood history of cunieform is available to the public, you can pay some researchers to write a few articles on the subject for wikipedia.

Oh, just see WP:UA.

[Grendel Drago]

The Unusual Articles list has plenty in that vein. I'm especially fond of Toynbee tiles, John Titor and heavy metal umlaut.

wiki doesnt impress me

[Stanneh]

wikipedia wont even entertain certain taboo subjects for example the 9/11 issues they are only willing to list the information if they can make it sound like loonacy otherwise its deleted

"Static" doesn't mean "Right"

[Anonymous Coward]

So which "static" version do I go to?

Rev A with the incorrect math formula
Rev B with the blatant non-NPOV
Rev C with the incorrect math formula again
Rev D could be factually corrct, but who could tell?
Rev E with the personal attacks and hearsay
Rev F vandalized by the 13 year old because "It'll be a kick-ass joke."

Seriously, "static" means nothing in this context in terms of reliability or correctness.

that "calculation" is bulls**t

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a big fan of Wikipedia. I think it's better than Britannica, and it's almost as good as sliced bread.
But that "calculation" in the summary text of this article is a steaming pile of bullshit. Wikipedia had 4 errors per article, and Britannica had 3, but Wikipedia's articles were 2.6 times longer than the Britannica ones, so that means Wikipedia's articles have a lower error rate?
No, I'm sorry, but if article A on a particular topic is 5 paragraphs long and has 2 errors, and article B on the same topic is 10 paragraphs long and has 4 errors, that DOES NOT mean that both articles are equivalent. It means that article B has twice as many errors AND is twice as wordy. Either way you look at it, article A is better written.
What does this mean? Abolutely nothing because we need more information about the facts presented in these articles. Does the longer article actually have more real information? Is the shorter article less accurate because it is missing information? Who knows. The only thing it might suggest is that perhaps some wikipedia articles might be in need of better and less verbose writing.

Battle of Agincourt (size matters)

[fyoder]

Length of article does matter. Here are articles from each for 'The Battle of Agincourt'.

Brittanica

Wikipedia

You can see that Wikipedia is much more informative.

What's that? I could get more info from Britannica if I paid for a membership or went to the library? Ha ha ha ha, right.

Britannica might be able to compete with Wikipedia if they tried, but they aren't interested. They are firmly wedded to the 'pay for content' model that has been their bread and butter for a very long time. The open web is just a marketing tool for them.

Wikipedia's Accuracy Compared to Britannica

[SebNukem]

Wikipedia's Accuracy Compared to Britannica - what does Wikipedia say about it?

What about accountability?

[furnk]

I, too, marvel at the depth of the Wikipedia, but I caution against using it as anything more than a background source for information. Why? Because you, at this point, have no real idea where the information came from. To me, saying that a bit of information is true "according to Wikipedia" is the same thing as saying that something is true "according to the Internet."

I think libel law is a great debate for Wikipedia. If Britannica had linked an innocent person to JFK's assassination, there would be lawsuits and firings. But because Wikipedia is so nebulous, you can't hold anyone responsible for it -- and Wikipedia admits to as much in its disclaimers:

Wikipedia cannot guarantee the validity of the information found here. The content of any given article may recently have been changed, vandalized or altered by someone whose opinion does not correspond with the state of knowledge in the relevant fields. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_dis claimer

Interestingly, at the bottom of Wikipedia's disclaimer page, it also takes a shot at Britannica, saying that the encyclopedia website's disclaimer uses the phrase "YOUR USE OF BRITANNICA.COM IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK." Unfortunately for Wikipedia, that phrase doesn't actually appear on the link provided. http://corporate.britannica.com/termsofuse.html

Finally, it's important to note what Wikipedia is really, really good at. From an Associated Press article on the report:

(Wikipedia founder Jimmy) Wales said the accuracy of his project varies by topic, with strong suits including pop culture and contemporary technology. That's because Wikipedia's stable of dedicated volunteers tend to have more collective expertise in such areas, he said.

The site tends to lag when it comes to topics touching on the humanities, such as the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature for a particular year, Wales said.

Please don't think that I am making the case against Wikipedia as a useful tool. It's an amazing tool -- and an ingenious one. But I'd hate to start seeing newspaper articles or students' term papers use Wikipedia as a primary source.

Britanica can't hold a candle to Wiki

[naisan]

Go look in the Brittanica for an article on the new SPR Rifle spec from the military - find anything? How about color management and a discussion on ProPhoto vs sRGB vs AdobeRGB color spaces? Anything there? What about an entry in Brittanica explaining what slashdot is? Ummm. . .nope. But Wiki does: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot

If I want to know about history I can go to the source on the web and make up my own mind, and learn something in the process.

And another thing: Brittanica attempts to give a "definitive" answer, which means the inherent bias remains hidden - with Wiki you know that real people like you gave their opinion, and so there's transparency around the fact that "...history [is] a fable, agreed upon" - NapoleonB.

Old people are stupid!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad you have learned so much more than college graduates, especially in the area of humility. I wish I were still young and omniscent like yourself.

Re:I challenge an assumption. "Her job"?

[koreaman]

It's "their job" you retard, and it has been for centuries.

Which brings the veracity fo the data

[crovira]

or the information (data in a context) to the fore.

What were there errors? Was it language or content?

The former is easily fixed; the latter is the cause of controversy.

Is there any difference between SMEs as to the veracity of the information?

Is the error more one of opinion?

These things matter.

Obviously

[Gizmoguy]

Yes, well, this was pretty obvious, as Britannica isn't exactly 'user editable'. Perhaps this may lead to a bi-anually hardcopy Wikipedia?

News: "Wikipedia hit by surge in spoof articles"

[6350']

The Times Online has an article today, noting that after the recent kerflufles over Wikipedia, and it's comparison to the Britanica, Wikipedia has been experiencing a surge of vandalism.

"In one such fake article, it was suggested today that Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's creator, was shot dead at his home by Siegenthaler's wife."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1933568, 00.html

Quark Error

[Anonymous Coward]

Well one of the articles - on quarks - which the Nature reviewer claimed was error free does have an error. Top quarks decay too fast to be confined. So it makes you wonder

(a) How good were the Nature reviewers - they certainly did not seem to apply the same rigour that they would (hopefully) with a paper

(b) What else did they miss?

Science Articles Less of a Problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing that it isn't the articles about science
which are more prone to misrepresentation. It's the
historical articles which are most likely to suffer
some type of revisionism to suite political and social
agendas.

Go away, you're not 21

[tepples]

One encyclopedia explains how to make wine, the other merely defines it.

Could it be because of alcohol related age restrictions that, by a fleeting loophole, affect print but not online?

Re:Go away, you're not 21

[hesiod]

> > One encyclopedia explains how to make wine, the other merely defines it.
> Could it be because of alcohol related age restrictions that, by a fleeting loophole, affect print but not online?

That is completely asinine. It is not illegal for a minor to know how to make alcoholic beverages, and it's even legal for them to actually make it. They just can't buy any from a store.

Why Britannica is still useful

[Hrvat]

Britannica is still useful precisely because it is a frozen encyclopedia. Someone can look at a reference in a research paper and know exactly which version of the text someone looked at and used in their research.
It also serves as a knowledge repository that can be used (EASILY) to see how the understanding of a particular topic has expanded and changed over the ages.
Once Wikipedia has the ability to easily show a page as it was on a particular day that would probably mean the end of Britannica.

Re:Why Britannica is still useful

[AxelBoldt]

Once Wikipedia has the ability to easily show a page as it was on a particular day that would probably mean the end of Britannica.

That day, my friend, is here. Go to any Wikipedia article and click on "history" in the top row. All previous versions of the article are listed, and you can look at them (and link to them) by clicking on the date. A link like that will be permanent and will always refer to the same version. You can also compare versions with the "Compare selected versions" tool.

If you are looking at the current version of an article and you want a permanent link to that specific version, use the "permanent link" in the toolbox on the left.

They should've also compared the number of facts

[krunk4ever]

Besides just comparing the # of error per article or per quantity of text, they should've compared it with the number of facts presented per article. This will also give us an approximation of how much more info one encyclopedia has over the other. I agree what a fact consists of may be subjective, but it shouldn't be too hard to set some guidelines for what a fact is for this study.

Wikipedia is definitely better.

[mnmn]

I've contributed (and been rebuffed) on the history of my own community, and have entered articles on the places I visited (which did not have entries) in Wikipedia. I can personally attest to Wikipedia's accuracy....

However, Wikipedia is as accurate as the majority of the people want them to be. Currently most of the submitters are educated enthuisiasts, but this can change as more people start submitting. What the majority of the people want to believe will enter Wikipedia compared to what the scholars think.

For now anyway, Wikipedia is doing better. Uighurs will write about Uighurs, Slovaks will write about Slovaks, Baloch will write about Baloch etc, rather than have some Oxford Englishman decide on the world history's accuracy. In the long run, thats as bad as a good thing.

Here's my letter to the people suing wikipedia...

[ClioCJS]

Dear WikiPedia ClassAction.org,

You are suing wikipedia because someone wrote something you don't like on it?
You are suing wikipedia to get them to change their policy of allowing anybody to write anything?

That's what a wiki is.
If that policy is changed, it would no longer be a wiki encyclopedia.

I'm sorry, but just because you don't like the technology, doesn't mean you can make it go away.

If I ran a bar, and put a whiteboard in the bathroom that anyone would write on, would you then think that you are eligible to sue me just because someone wrote something you don't like on it?

Whoever you are, you are an asshole and a detriment to society and humanity as a whole.
I wish the most painful cancer on you, your children, your parents, and your associates.

An unknown AU newspaper vs Nature.I'd pick Nature

[Devistater]

The previous slashdot article was some unknown austrailian newspaper doing an informal comparision. I'd sooner take the peer reviewed Nature's results anyday.

pedants missed the point.

[Superfarstucker]

I think the point of the thought experiment was to ascertain whether or not wikipedia was comparable to a dead tree encyclopedia, not to establish that it was superior. I'm a believer.

Re:I challenge an assumption. "Her job"?

[koreaman]

Uh... I'm not a "sexual equality worshiper", I'm merely pointing out common English usage...

The Good and the Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

I am an encyclopedia reader. I love to sit with each book and read from cover to cover. This I of course can not do with an online encyclopedia. (I stopped at the letter 'I' last time)

I have a tremendous amount of experience using encyclopedias and will say that anyone with any love for reference material should understand that the beauty of an encyclopedia length article is that you can read them all. I often read the Britannica article, the 1911 Britannica article to see if the facts have changed (as most people learn they often do), I read the wikipedia article, and the encarta article.

The consistancy of Britannica is worthy of the highest regard. I find that when doing longer research where I will need to reference many articles, not just one, I prefer Britannica over the others since the articles are all of a very high standard of quality in writing and editing. I am not knocking the others, I'm am simply stating that it is my preference in style that makes this true for me.

The bibliography style links in wikipedia are priceless. I even like when there are commercial links involved. For example, when I am researching audio related standards and hardware for work (I'm in the video business), I regularly appreciate when there is a link to the company that appears to contribute the most to a specific standard. (Remember not all standards are written, in the video business, most are actually defacto)

Wikipedia also provides a tremendous amount of insight for me when I'm reading the history of articles. There have been times where I've been thouroughly disgruntled by the type of information written, for example, if you search on 'Sidney Darlington' and read the original article, it states "He later died in prison serving a 10 year sentence for creating kiddy porn". This is unacceptable and even though it was corrected by someone else, it's truly sad that such a thing is still there for all to see. This is a man that in biographies that I've read was in fact considered quirky and often strange (in the same way that most of us nerdy types are), but he was a respectable man, husband, and father. It's a shame to think that his children or grandchildren would be able to look up this great man they called dad or grandpa and see such a horrible thing written about him. Although I love Wikipedia, I am terrified by the type of people that sometimes contribute to it.

An encyclopedia is also heavily influenced by politics. Wikipedia is as well but in a very confusing manner at times. The focus of the articles can be in so many directions. For example, although I haven't read the latest entry, I read the article on Pope Benny the four hundred and ninety fifth shortly after he took over leading his sheep. From what I can recall, the article focussed a great deal on whether or not he was guilty of terrible things during the war. Although this information is valuable, I can tell the article was written by as biased against the church as I am, but for different reasons. I found the authors' styles interesting, but I can easily tell that the article would experience a massive amount of revisions and political debate regarding how to balance the good and the bad.

Britannica tends to avoid many topics that could spawn dramatic debates regarding whether or not to allow it in schools in Kansas. This is a weakness and a strength. To write a quality article on a contraversial topic while only stating information that can be swallowed by the majority of their audience without causing a great deal of disruption can be very high. It makes the authors and editors think a lot more regarding what is relevant or not. It also makes it so that every word in these articles are relevant beyond doubt. If the author writes something that can trigger a large libel lawsuit, the facts have been checked well enough to guarantee that Britannica will win in court. Sadly the downside of this is that often they don't publish information that may in fact be true, but can not be defended in court.

I'm too tired to

At least I know how much to trust Wikipedia

[tgibbs]

Given the choice, I'd send a student to Wikipedia over Britanica.

The biggest problem with an "authoritative source" like Britanica, is that people--especially students--are tempted to take it as a final authority. But Britanica is not infallible, and even when it is correct, it is often superficial. People are tempted to settle for predigested opinions instead of forming their own

I think that the vulnerability of Wikipedia is in some respects a good thing, because it inculcates good research habits. I don't take Wikipedia as a final authority on anything, because I know that any given article might have been edited by a crackpot or an ideologue. Quote Wikipedia as an authority in a debate, and people will laugh at you. But I find Wikipedia extremely useful as a starting point for research; I just confirm anything important from primary sources--something that you should be doing this even if you use Britanica.

Re:At least I know how much to trust Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

Truly sad to see someone who is in a position of
teaching employ such contorted and contrived logic
in order to justify an agenda. Truly, your are an
example of why "open-source" zealots retard the
advancement of learning.

Kent Wilson

Re:At least I know how much to trust Wikipedia

[tgibbs]

Truly sad to see someone who is in a position of
teaching employ such contorted and contrived logic
in order to justify an agenda. Truly, your are an
example of why "open-source" zealots retard the
advancement of learning.

The amusing thing here is that I am not particularly an open source advocate. In general, I don't really much care whether the software I use is open source or proprietary; I'm only interested in how useful it is to me in practice. Which is the same way I evaluate Wikipedia.

Citing an encyclopaedia is fine

[Paul Crowley]

Not everything you reference is to do with the very core of your subject. If I'm explaining an algorithm in a paper on cryptography, and I want to use an algorithm well-known from a distinct and related field, there's no problem with giving an encyclopaedia cite for the algorithm, since that's the one most useful to the person reading the paper who wants to understand that detail. The encyclopaedia in turn should have the primary references for someone who wants deeper information on that subject.

I'm guessing from your WP bio that you don't have any publications yet. If and when you come to write one, be careful about speaking in an authoritative tone about things that you're not authoritative on :-)

but do either say "Don't Panic" on the front?

[geekee]

I would prefer an encyclopedia that says Don't Panic on the front page or cover

Instantaneous Content

[dave1g]

Many times when I read a news story and I find it interesting I will check wikipedia to see if I can add some new info from the article to the entry there.

Ony once had the new bleeding edge research not already been nicely integrated into the current article and sourced with a link to the academic paper or article.

"Rife with howling factual errors"

[AFCArchvile]

The Register had a letters section with people citing numerous errors. Among one of them was a former Data General product manager who wrote in his blog about the "howling factual errors" in the Wikipedia entry for the AViiON server line.

Among the errors is the origin of the OS that the servers ran, a System V variant called DG/UX. From the cited incorrect version (22 July 2005):

The first systems in the series were released in the summer of 1989, followed by a series of speed-bumped versions over the next few years. All of these systems ran a version of System V Unix written for them by Santa Cruz Operation, known as DG/UX, to which they added NUMA support.

And in the current version:

The machines ran a System V Unix variant known as DG/UX, largely developed at the company's Research Triangle Park facility. DG/UX had previously run on the company's family of MV/Eclipse 32-bit minicomputers (the successors to Nova and the 16-bit Eclipse minis) but only in a very secondary role to the MV/Eclispse mainstay AOS/VS and AOS/VS II operating systems.

Night and day. And there was more (quote from the Register letters article):

"It's also interesting to observe in the main Data General article how many "futzing around" edits there are. A link polished here, a comma there, etc. Yet this article as a whole is incredibly poorly organized with no real narrative flow. And what storyline exists is wrong in significant ways; it's not even internally consistent," he writes.

"The whole lock-in or no lock-in paragraph is 75% nonsense (it seems to imply that DG went to Unix because it couldn't afford to develop a SQL database? Yet, further down the article correctly notes that DG HAD a SQL database already.) The AViiON section mixes timeframes and contains multiple out-and-out errors, etc. (I suspect that the first couple of sections source their information largely from Soul of A New Machine and seem fairly accurate and cogent, but then it falls apart.) But that would all take work and expertise to fix."

"Easier to twiddle than create," he concludes.

Encyclopedia Tuxlovica

[tuxlove]

The "Encyclopedia Tuxlovica", my own personal encyclopedia, has ZERO errors. It's clearly superior to both Wikipedia and Britannica. Never mind that it has no content yet, what's there is error-free!

Re:An unknown AU newspaper vs Nature.I'd pick Natu

[kadj]

If you consider The Age to be an unknown AU newspaper, you should at least check its Wikipedia entry, which currently describes it to be "one of Australia's most influential newspapers".

Only for general knowledge

[Dire Bonobo]

> If I'm explaining an algorithm in a paper on cryptography, and I want to use an algorithm
> well-known from a distinct and related field

Then you would cite a textbook, or some other authoritative and reliable source which is appropriately specialized to the field in question. An encyclopedia is a general reference, and as such is not an appropriate source to cite for anything other than the most general of knowledge, such as "Russia is the largest country in the world" or "Napoleon was born on Corsica".

Wikipedia, of course, being roughly as accurate as an encyclopedia, is just as inappropriate to cite---there's no particular reason to believe that any entry is either sufficiently complete or sufficiently correct at the moment you read it. Sure, it's probably fine, but that's not enough of a guarantee for it to be a reasonable citation; find something better.

Hackability

[Dire Bonobo]

Which one is more likely to have been changed by you to support your paper between the time you cite it and the time your professor reviews it?

He's got no reason to believe it's unbiased without doing additional digging. And, if he has to do additional digging, what good is it as a cite?

a million monkeys

[Anonymous Coward]

This comparison of error rates completely misses the point. Because of this slander business, millions of more people now actually know there is this thing called Wikipedia. It's probably the best thing that's ever happened to it, besides being started in the first place. Controversy makes great publicity.

Wikipedia reminds me of the old line: if you get a million monkeys to pound on keyboards they will eventually write a Shakespeare sonnet. Well, the Internet has proved this wrong... no sonnet. But, they've come up with a damn fine encyclopedia. Damn fine.

ass to mouth

[Anonymous Coward]

wikipedia does contain a lot of useful information. what would we all do without an article on ass to mouth?

Wikipedia and Britannica are equally poor

[emilper]

Why compare Wikipedia and Britannica ? Compare those two with the encyclopaedias printed around 1900 ... in the former you find terse, unaccurate, most of the time obsolete information and hardly any references, while in the later you find much larger articles, much more relevant illustration and, as far as I can tell for the subjects that interest me, much more relevant references.

Recent encyclopaedias seem to be less and less focused on encyclo paedia, and more focused on provinding high status shelf fillers.

Researching for an encyclopaedia is very expensive, so if done properly Britannica would probably cost 20000$ instead of 2000$, but right now it's not encyclo and it's not paedia, so maybe it should be renamed to PopQuiz Assistant Britannica for HighLifers. Wikipedia is not very different (PopQuiz Assistant Wikipedia for the rest of us), but it tends to have more references (not necessarily more relevant references) and together with [fill in your favorite search engine] and [fill in your file sharing network of choice] makes a better tool than Britannica.

<rant>When the original Encyclopaedia described wind mills (which were high tech at that time), it acctually showed you how to build one. "encyclopaedias" of today ? ... blah ...

Re:Wikipedia and Britannica are equally poor

[emilper]

I forgot to add that Wikipedia still has a change to grow beyond what it is now ... some day real experts might write articles (maybe some do it right now) .... Britannica and the rest of the commercial encyclopaedias ? ... no way, since I don't think the publishers can do better with the money they are putting in now.

Re:An unknown AU newspaper vs Nature.I'd pick Natu

[Devistater]

I doubt its anywhere as prestigious as Nature. And its not peer reviewed before publishing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_magazine "Nature is one of the oldest and most reputable scientific journals, first published on 4 November 1869. Although most scientific journals are now highly specialized, Nature is idiosyncratic (along with other journals such as Science and PNAS) in still publishing original research articles across a wide range of scientific fields. In most fields of scientific research, many of the most important new advances each year are usually published as articles or letters in Nature." My point is that for a scientific study or analysis, I'd trust Nature first. I'm not denigrating the AU newspaper, I've never read it. But its not a scientific journal. Newspapers are great places to get general news, and sometimes good places to get info on investigative stuff. But for scientific studies, Nature is one of the first places to check :)

Somewhat pointless

[celticryan]

While it is nice to have online information for the average person to look up things, how many authors who have published in Nature have actually cited something from either source. My guess is that you could count them on one hand. Especially for the case of wikipedia, since the content will change with time. Neither of these two sources are authoratative on any subject and the world should know that by now.

Wikipedia accuracy??

[JudMc]

Some articles are very good. Some are terrible. Look up "Roswell UFO incident". Look up "Philip J. Klass" to see if Britannica would publish something like that.

Penny-Arcade's take

[sukotto]

Funny this should come up again the same day that Penny-Arcade published their take on Wikipedia. Their unhappy experience regarding their Elemenstor project spawned this comic and this news post. (Hey PA guys, fix your stupid redirect engine)

Excerpt from the news post

Reponses to criticism of Wikipedia go something like this: the first is usually a paean to that pure democracy which is the project's noble fundament. If I don't like it, why don't I go edit it myself? To which I reply: because I don't have time to babysit the Internet. Hardly anyone does. If they do, it isn't exactly a compliment.

Any persistent idiot can obliterate your contributions. The fact of the matter is that all sources of information are not of equal value, and I don't know how or when it became impolitic to suggest it. In opposition to the spirit of Wikipedia, I believe there is such a thing as expertise.

The second response is: the collaborative nature of the apparatus means that the right data tends to emerge, ultimately, even if there is turmoil temporarily as dichotomous viewpoints violently intersect. To which I reply: that does not inspire confidence. In fact, it makes the whole effort even more ridiculous. What you've proposed is a kind of quantum encyclopedia, where genuine data both exists and doesn't exist depending on the precise moment I rely upon your discordant fucking mob for my information.

Grammar. Off-topic.

[orgelspieler]

Sorry for the late reply. It is disputable, but most English teachers and professors say the correct phrase is either "his job" or "her job." "His job" is still preferred by many (including our trolling friend). Some say the gender of the author should be used. Others say to do whatever flows best. Almost nobody suggests "he/she" anymore.

"Their" is a plural possessive adjective and should not (in my opinion) be used to refer to a singular antecedent, in this case "copyeditor." Some people have pressed for various neuter singular possessives. None of these have caught on, with the exception of singular they, common in colloquial English. As you point out, it has been common for quite some time.

From a stylistic standpoint, I think using a singular pronoun emphasizes the individuality of the antecedent. I picked feminine because I like women. :-)