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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.
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."
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...).
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
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.
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.
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.
They had a seperate category for egregious errors like the latter - of which, (from TFA) 4 were found in Wikipedia and 4 in Britannica
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
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).
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
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.
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.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Note that study only picked 42 science articles. This does not mean that britannica has that rate of errors for other diciplines.