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

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

[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

[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.

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

[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.

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: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.

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: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: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: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).

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!

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: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: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: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: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.

"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.