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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.
Slashdot Article Compared to Earlier Slashback: Found To Be Identical
Story available here.
Wikipedia has less errors, you say? We'll be fixing that shortly...
-- The Britanica Team
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Does Britannica have extencive articles on Lightsaber combat?
Wikipedia: 1
Britannica: 0
Reality is a big nasty dragon. Fortunately I don't believe in dragons.
...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...
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
What does Britannica say about "Goatse"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse
"Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forty percent of all people know that." -- Homer Simpson
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
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.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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
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?
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.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Bleh. /me adds "PhoenixK7" to the list of people who should hit "preview" first.
So, what you're saying is that Britannica has a long way to go before it will be useful as a wiki?
I get 33% more errors, it takes me 160% more time, and random lusers on the Internet say it's a good thing...
It's hilarious to mod a "dupe" complaint down as redundant. If only we could mod the original stories that way.
So you have no idea or basis for this claim?
He read it in Wikipedia, right after he wrote it.
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...
What an accurate and concise summary of Slashdot - you should work for Wikipedia.
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.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)