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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.
So if I go to Wikipedia and type the word "gibblefinch" a few thousand times into an article, I can reduce its error rate?
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
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.
http://www.busyweather.com/
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
Sure they found errors in Wikipedia and Britannica, but which one can you go back to and correct?
Game, set, match!
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.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
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).
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
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."
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.
What does Britannica say about "Goatse"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse
... 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...
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.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
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.
"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.
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.
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?
Wikipedia seems fine for informal use, but how can you possible cite sources with something that is constantly changing?
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
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.
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.
You (and implictly the submitter) are assuming longer == more content. Typically, better writers can say more with less words. Of course, more credentialed != better.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
So, what you're saying is that Britannica has a long way to go before it will be useful as a wiki?
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
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
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
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.
Did the experts correct the errors? I hope so.
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.
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.
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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see 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...
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.
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
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.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
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.
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.
Note that study only picked 42 science articles. This does not mean that britannica has that rate of errors for other diciplines.
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".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.
It really seems that Wikipedia is an good encyclopedia of things that actually matter to most people.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
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.
Well, it would be more accurate to say that wikepdia is full of facts that people want to share.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen