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Britannica Attacks - Nature Returns Fire
An anonymous reader writes "Just in case you missed it, Nature has replied to Britannica's criticism of the Nature Britannica-Wikipedia comparison. I think it is fair to say Nature is not sympathetic to Britannica's complaints." The original piece regarding the accuracy comparison, along with the response from Britannica.
I want to fix the spelling error "comparasion".
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Original Nature article comparing Britannica and Wikipedia
I want to bring back the OMG Ponies!!! skin. It roxxored.
We can't all get what we want.
"original piece"
It's really becoming clear reading the article (to me, and probably to Britannica) that the writing is on the wall. Take this quote from the article:
"Other objections are simply incorrect. The company has, for example, claimed that in one case we sent a reviewer material that did not come from any Britannica publication."
That - right there is Brittanica getting desperate & flailing around attempting to attack anyone who criticizes them. Note - I don't think Wikipedia is going to 'take over' from Brittanica, its merely one of the many sources (albeit, currently the most important) you can turn to for free, online information.
The niche that Brittanica used to fill is simply closing - I suggest Brittanica concentrates on expanding its scope rather then attacking criticism if it wants to survive in future.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I had to RTFM just to make since out of the headline. It would have been nice if they mentioned that Nature was the magazine. I thought there was some disagreement between Britannica and Wikipedia description of nature then Nature herself set Britannica on fire. But it made me RTFM so I guess it worked.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Britannica is authorative, peer reviewed and reliable but it costs money. Wikipedia can be spotty but is generally authorative, peer (+ idiot) reviewed and mostly reliable. It costs nothing but has massively more articles and can turn on a dime to cover current events, weather, popular culture etc.. While I feel sorry for Britannica, the simple fact is that most people are not going to fork a pile of cash when Wikipedia is good enough for day to day use.
I think it's amusing that an established publication (Britannica) is worried about another established and peer-reviewed publication (Nature) making favourable comparisons with Wikipedia. We should now see Britannica write about the similarities between Nature and the arXiv!
Phoenix, Boston, Little Rock, see a pattern?
Did Britain reestablish the Empire, increase their greenhouse gas production and get wiped out by a natural desaster? Are two hacker groups accusing each other? Is this some Ultima fan-fiction? What the hell is this story about?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Wikipedia is so much better than Britanica in so many ways. For example if you look up Allentown, Pennsylvania it tells me, "The city also is somewhat known for a Billy Joel song, "Allentown," which appeared on Joel's "The Nylon Curtain" (1982) and "Greatest Hits: Volume II" (1985) albums. The song depicts the resolve of Allentonians, amidst the rough and hardened life that characterizes this East Coast, industrial city. "Allentown" also references nearby Bethlehem, home of the then-declining (and now defunct) Bethlehem Steel Corporation." While this may not be a fact that is highbrow enough for inclusion in Britannica, this is actually one of the things I think of when I think of that city -- making it much more useful to me on a practical level.
Or in other words:
Here's what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colorless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. It says that the effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.
Thats the difference.
--
Elephant Essays - Custom-created essays and research papers.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
It's the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy versus Encyclopedia Galactica all over again...
Looks like someone is mad because you don't have to PAY for their services any more.
Britannica should justify why people SHOULD pay for their product, rather than argue with their free competitors.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I can't wait for Britannica's reply to Nature's reply about Britannica's criticism of the Nature Britannica-Wikipedia comparison !
From the original Britannica "attack": In its December 15, 2005, issue, the science journal Naturepublished an article that claimed to compare the accuracy of the online Encyclopaedia Britannica with Wikipedia, the Internet database that allows anyone, regardless of knowledge or qualifications, to write and edit articles on any subject. (emphasis added by me)
Does anyone think this isn't just Britannica watching its business get clobbered by an online startup, and trying to defend itself? Old guard versus young upstart. Britannica should just buy Wikipedia and maintain both, and just market them differently.
For what it's worth, there appears to be over 6,500 articles on Wikipedia that use Britannica as a reference, which suggests that the folks writing Wikipidia consider Britannica as a reliable source of information. (Not surprisingly, you cannot find Wikipedia in Britannica.)
Finally, there is one possible problem with the Nature investigation... the question is not total accuracy at one point in time, but overall accuracy over a long period of time. Wikipedia is constantly changing; Britannica is less frequently updated. What does this mean for a researcher? Has Wikipedia been a reliable research tool for the last 365 days, just as Britannica has been?
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Why was Nature mixing Britannica and non-Britannica materials together for the reviewer? Was the intent to place the Britannica materials in a certain, and erroneous, context so that the reviewers would be led to an incorrect interpretation?
The more that surfaces about Nature's tactics (and possibly strategy) here, the more suspicious Nature's intentions look.
Was there any coverage here on /. of Britannica's rebuttal a week or so ago? I must have missed it.
to RTFA. Geez.
This is exactly what all the fuss is about. :)
I guess it's stating the obvious... but it helps to mention it from time to time
02:57, April 3, 2006 Nature (rv. we've been through this a thousand times already and consensus is against you, so stop doing this) ...or it's "original research" or it's "a self-reference" or whatever your excuse du jour is. Uh uh.)
00:51, April 3, 2006 Britannica (Basic concepts of Review - removed the OR, cleaned up the stating of the word history as spelled out in Terra Incognita)
00:37, April 3, 2006 Nature m (rv
00:14, April 3, 2006 Britannica (removed redundant disambiguation and restated the first sentence. Comparison has ideas but is an activity. See discussion page)
15:48, April 1, 2006 FactsGuy (RV another of Britannica's anti-consensus, POV, ill-written revisions. Britannica, please stop doing this!)
15:12, April 1, 2006 Britannica (Basic concepts of comparison - removed the OR, "may have been inspired by" because that is someone's conjection and OR conclusion and not cited here)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
So, just to be clear, Nature doesn't actually deny any of the claims that Brittanica makes, it just says that they are irrelevent.
[BITTER WHINE]
And I submitted this story last week.
[/BITTER WHINE]
For those who are looking at the above wondering "Huh?", remember that if one person has three errors, and the other has four, then the other has "a third more errors" than the first. That means the difference between 96% and 97% accurate is "a third more errors" - but most people would look at the two figures and, rightly, say they're very close. In Nature's case, the headline appears to be accurate, and Britannica, in suggesting otherwise on this basis, is engaging in sophistry.
Britannica then goes on to claim many of the facts Nature depended upon were false. That may be true, but claims like the above suggest Britannica itself is more than willing to massage the facts, and for an organization that's dependent upon its own credibility, that's actually devastating.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
This is an easily demarkated event occuring to an historic institution which illustrates the current and future cultural and intellectual climate. What Guttenberg did, in itself didn't create anything extraordinary, but it changed the order of magnitude of use of an existing technology. It allowed an order of magnitude of more readers to read what used to be expensive books (one of the more popular, and duly important is in fact the Encyclopedia Brittanica). What Wikipedia allows is an order of magnitude of more editors and commentaries to provide information (and for free). The system is not perfect, but with the help of a tuned submission and editorial procedures, Wikiepedia's abilities far outweigh the Brittanica's venerable, though glorified, trustworthiness.
This seems to be happening on many fronts, and in many places with the advent of viral communication. But as this debate involves clear, historically relevant, as well as practically useful opponents it seems it will be pretty memorable. If you read the rebuttles to each others' works from a technologically historical perspective the arguments are interesting and can be applied to so much. And coming from two institutions which pride themselves on their intellectual merrits, such documents might be interesting to keep and look at in a few years when more and more of these same arguments pop up in less public and less known situations.
On the other hand it seems to retain the vigor and mundanity of a nerd fight.
because they charge for informaton.. but to anyone who bothers to read all of the articles it does look like Britannica has some valid points. Nature didn't even provide all of the data, and they don't even bother to address this point. Nature appears pretty dishonest when they point out Britannica only had issues with less than half of the 123 errors they pointed out. That's a large enough number when the difference was 3 - 4 to begin with.
Nature could have done a better job at this. I don't doubt that Wiki is only half as accurate as Brit.. I will still use Wikipedia, but Nature did a piss poor job to rush out a controversial story.
Britannica's days are numbered, but it doesn't mean they're wrong. I guess at least now I know that Nature's editors suck.
One thing that should be said: Encyclopaedia Britannica has sold its print version by sending extremely high-pressure salesmen into poor neighborhoods to imply that if poor families didn't buy Britannica their children would always be ignorant. Parents were often extremely intimidated.
Families who had no habit of reading books would buy the print version of Britannica and pay for it in installments. My impression is that the books were almost never read. I've seen bookcases of expensive books that have never been opened. If children never see their parents reading, the children usually won't read either.
From the Nature response:
"While we were quite willing to discuss the issues, the company [Britannica] failed to provide specific details of its complaints when we asked for them in order to be able to assess its allegations. We did not receive any further correspondence until the publication of its open letter on 22 March 2006. It is regrettable that Britannica chose to make its objections public without first informing us of them and giving us a chance to respond."
This seems to me to be another abuse of the public's trust. Britannica responded with a confident-sounding ad when actually the company wanted to avoid discussion.
And that abuse got them into a Slashdot story once again.
I'd like to see a study of the sociology of arrogant company executives with sink-the-company ideas.
--
Before, Saddam got Iraq oil profits & paid part to kill Iraqis. Now a few Americans share Iraq oil profits, & U.S. citizens pay to kill Iraqis. Improvement?
Has someone already created a Wikipedia page on this little tryst? (there is the difference between E-B and W-P :) W-P can be made up to date faster)
80 CC D8 AF AE D3 AB 54 B7 2E CE 67 C7
Very weak response. Britanicca took issue with "less than half" the problems. Half is a lot! And the year book response is weak too. Nature was busted on this one. They ought to hang their heads and apologise.
But neither of them feature the words "Don't Panic" in nice, friendly letters on the cover.
In some ways the argument is bit irrelevant, as it is comparing apples and oranges - Wiki and Britannica are compiled in different ways and both have their uses, data in both of them is likely to be _mostly_ accurate, and I wouldn't particularly trust either of them as any more than a starting point (I prefer primary sources where possible).
One valid point that Britannica made is that Nature should release the data (minus of course the names of the anonymous reviewers). or at least the full text of excerpts that were compared and where they were taken from - then anyone that wanted to could judge for themselves how biased Nature's claims are, and whether Britannica's counter-claims have any substance. Otherwise the whole thing is reduced to a 'they said' 'we said' kind of slanging match.
(Queue Evening News Theme Music)
<Favorite News Anchor Impression>
Today it was revealed that an organization whose business model is dependent upon selling a product, has been willing to massage, bend and manipulate data in attempts to discredit competitors who give away similar products.
(Ominous Pause)
Film at eleven.
</Favorite News Anchor Impression>
(Queue Evening News Theme Music)
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Wikipedia: Almost as good as Britanica without all pseudo-intellecutal pretentions!
Wikipedia: At Least You Can Correct Our Missteaks!
Wikipedia: Suck It, Trebek
Wikipedia: Nature Almost Likes Us!
Wikipedia: 3 out of 4 Slashdotters Prefer Us!
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Google though does an incredible job of matching keywords with Wikipedia Pages. Combined with I'm-Feeling-Lucky and Firefox's keyword bookmarks, we have magic.
3 Aen.wikipedia.org&btnI=I'm+Feeling+Lucky&meta=
A Firefox Quick Search bookmark everybody needs to have.
http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&q=%25s+site%
The problem with Wikipedia can be easily understood if you are using Slashdot in regular basis.
FANATICS and ZEALOTS.
E.g. while reading an article about Apple Computer, for example recent fight with Beatles Record company, I have even seen people attacking the record company as some "crook company" "not doing anything". Erm, they own the rights of 165 million selling (just in USA!) Beatles.
Now, that same comment owner as these are "web 2.0" fashion days must have a Wikipedia account. Somehow you may need a very critical info about Apple Computers which _should be_ neutral as it can be.
Just imagine you read the "info" written by that person and rely on it.
That is the problem.
Oh BTW, IMHO Brittanica should make use of bittorrent technology and make site "totally same as the DVD set". That time, people will pay for it. People hates waiting for FedEx or DHL to deliver the freaking "plastic". That is the problem.
Wikipedia users in January found out on the talk page, trying to make sure they used written sources to correct articles, and not just Nature's word, that in actuality, conflicting sources say that he was the 13th child, and others say he was the 14th, because historians disagree. They made a note of this in the article.
About two and a half months later, after Wikipedia has already fixed the 'error,' Britannica comes out with the response, and does not directly admit they made an error, but goes on to disagree with Nature saying he was the 14th child, and brags about how they noted historians disagree on the issue of whether he was 13th or 14th. The new Britannica issue will be coming off the presses with the error corrected in about a year, probably. I see a lesson here.
I agree that Britannica's comments are disingenuous at best, but they are not wrong. What's wrong is having a discussion at this level of detail.
/. discussion re: wikipedia makes them. And therein lies the rub; Britannica is certainly right to attack on the details (which as I illustrated are somewhat non-sensical), but the details are largely irrelevant to the real point of the discussion (and shame on Nature for not emphasizing that).
To address your point directly, there is no discussion of error/accuracy/inaccuracy percentages, as such a measure is implausible. Would one count the number of facts and then state what percent are erroneous? Then who decides what in an article counts as a "fact" (and no, I'm not proposing relativism for truth)? Should all facts be given equal weight (e.g., is having the 5th decimal place wrong comparable to having the wrong stochiometric balance)? Since there is no logical framework to discuss these questions (and frankly, I can't see it would be worthwhile to do so), the only thing that can be studied scientifically (in the strict sense of the word) is error-rate and even that is misleading (as there is no ready way to compare magnitude of error).
Thus, Nature was wrong (both in the semantic and practical sense) in its headline. I would have preferred the title "Wikipedia-Britannica Error-Rate Comparison," followed by the data, some statistical analysis, and qualifications about the inadequacy of the comparison (but then, no one likes to admit that what they've done doesn't really get to the heart of the issue).
There are plenty of engineering-like judgements to be drawn about the practicality of Wikipedia over Britannica (given the cost difference and acceptably comparable error-rate/magnitude for day-to-day use), indeed any
I was a Britannica salesperson during the late 1980s (I sucked so I didn't last long). Their are huge problems of ignorance among the children of the upper lower class and lower middle class. Britannica offered terrific self study materials for children interested in any topic to learn about it through Britannica. What they were trying to do was to teach parents how to build a culture of learning in their household.
You grew up with one. Lots of parents don't know how to "look something up", the 2 volume index taught them. They don't know how to study a subject on their own, the outline of human knowledge taught them. They don't read information in context, macropedia.
Think about what a situation would like: 3 -4 kids
Britannica
Great Books of the Western World (maybe)
Merriam Webster 3 volume dictionary (free)
Annals of America (free)
Compton's encyclopedia for the younger children (only an extra $100)
Children's 6 volume encyclopedia for the very young children
Now you tell me. Was that worth $1300?
LOL. That was an extremely academic response that made a point using a deeply authoritative source.
Here's a link to the entire article: Chapter 22 - Life, the Universe, and Everything.
And, another quote: "Where you would be wrong would be in failing to realize that the editor, like all the editors of the Guide has ever had, has no real grasp of the meanings of the words "scrupulous", "conscientious" or "diligent", and tends to get his nightmares through a straw."
Ok, Britannica beats Wikipedia on accuracy 3-4. Now give us your corrections and see who beats who in publishing the most accurate new edition.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
The strength of wikipedia is that if there is an error you can fix it. The study is inaccurate because one an error is discovered on wikipedia, the error should be fixed on wikipedia. An error in Britannica would need a lot more time to be reviewed and changed and published.
Wikipedia works on the idea that there will always be errors, but they should always be easily fixable.
So to update the study: Britannica: 142 errors, Wikipedia: 0.
"when life gets complicated, I like to take a nap in a tree and wait for dinner" - Hobbes.
were we mislead by Nature? Nature is more than just a magazine, it is a scientific journal. If the claims of cutting and pasting are correct, it is extremely irresponsible and we may as well stop reading Nature and spend more time on People. Nature was not just a magazine, although now we have to re-evaluate.
Information should be free!
An error-rate IS a percentage.
If we were to use a non-percentage error metric I can easily write a reference source that beats the hell out of Britannica and Wikipedia. It goes like this:
1+1 = 2
You absolutely have to consider both the amount of content, and the number of errors. This is the percentage of errors.
Now it's non trivial to do this in a purely objective way, but that doesn't make the task hopeless, it just means you have to do your studies carefully.
And if Nature did it double-blind, that's hard data to refute! Britannica's on weak footing tackling this data just be refuting their own inaccuracies. After all, who's going to stand up for Wikipedia and post 10 pages of "We don't accept that this is an error because we say so"?
Exactly.
I suspect there is one flaw in the Nature study. In the response, they mention that the articles were presented "blindly" to the reviewers, ie, a reviewer got either an article from Wikipedia or an article from Britannica, without knowing for sure which one, and then the reviwers checked the veracity of the article.
However, did the Nature researches blindly choose Wikipedia entries before passing them on to the reviewers? If so, then the study would HAVE to have included Wiki pages that were obviously vandalized, eg an article on say, Wolfgang Mozart, that had been reduced to one sentence like "Mozart f***ing RULEZ! Salieri SUX!!"
I doubt it. So the Nature researchers probably had certain criteria that biased the results. Indeed, until Nature provides the data you request, we'll never know.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
My point was that no one actually read the books. For one thing, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is boring. It is heavily edited to fit on the amount of paper EB wants to afford, and that usually kills the interesting detail. In actuality, traditional encyclopedias have always been extremely limited, and in some cases actually destructive.
I tried searching for Nobel Prize winning genetecist "Barbara McClintock" in Microsoft Encarta 2000 encyclopedia. There were four (4) sentences which do not at all give the impression that her work is extremely relevant to the very best science of today.
The Britannica article about Barbara McClintock is less antiseptic than the Microsoft article, but still doesn't give an accurate impression of her as a scientist or person. The online Britannica has, at least in the past, been limited to articles written and edited for printing on paper.
There is the thought among scientists today that when we fully understand the phenomena of the movement of genes which Barbara McClintock first discovered, we will understand the chemistry of evolution. Genetic mutations due to destructive forces such as X-rays are generally destructive mutations. But the movements or transpositions of genes which Barbara McClintock discovered "are more likely to improve the evolutionary fitness of a species", says the Microsoft encyclopedia.
There is a document on the web which discusses Barbara McClintock's work. It says at the top, "Papers, 1927-1991, 70.5 linear feet". Neither of the traditional encyclopedias gives the impression of such prodigious dedication.
In her Nobel acceptance speech, Barbara McClintock said that "rapid reorganizations of genomes may underlie some species formations". It is now 79 years after she began this work, and still the average person has been taught that evolution is caused by millions of accidental blind mutations, most of which kill the organism, but a few of which are improvements. Barbara McClintock's work indicates that evolution may be far more sophisticated than most people think. For an example of this sophistication, consider the following paragraph from her Nobel acceptance speech:
"The conclusion seems inescapable that cells are able to sense the presence in their nuclei of ruptured ends of chromosomes, and then to activate a mechanism that will bring together and then unite these ends, one with another. And this will occur regardless of the initial distance in a telophase nucleus that separated the ruptured ends. The ability of a cell to sense these broken ends, to direct them toward each other, and then to unite them so that the union of the two DNA strands is correctly oriented, is a particularly revealing example of the sensitivity of cells to all that is going on within them. They make wise decisions and act upon them."
Chromosomes which are so sophisticated that they almost seem to be intelligent? Her works require 70.5 feet of shelf space? These interesting facts are left out of the traditional encyclopedias.
The traditional encyclopedias are actually damaging, because their bland, boring presentation may convince the reader that the world is a bland, boring place.
I think you let yourself get drawn off in a tangent here. We were discussing the role of encyclopedias in developing a culture of education in the homes of poor parents. Encyclopedias are not supposed to provide an easy good read. For something like what you want a biography would be perfect.
.1 linear feet if she published multiple papers per year. You would use linear feet to measure warehouse space not so that measure is is probably all the lab book from her lab and scrap notes. No one puts that much useful material. 70.5 linear feet would hold most small town libraries.
Further McClintock doesn't have 70.5 linear feet out output, she might have
Cool funny t-shirts for geeks, gamers and everyone else
To fault Britannica for defending themselves when faced with defamation is ridiculous. Yes, some of the issued raised in Britannica's response could be considered "nit picking", however; several of the points hold weight and should not be overlooked. Despite anyones opinion, the method in which this study was conducted leaves much to be desired, and Nature should be abashed to have conducted it so poorly, yet retain their stance that it its findings are completely sound. The fact that those called upon to review the articles still wish to remain annonymous backs my argument.
In 1986, I purchased a print set of Encyclopedia Britannica. One fine day, I happened to want to find out more about Velcro (r) (tm) (etc), but it had nothing available.
The encyclopedia salesman came back in 91 or 92 with a shiny new CD, which contained all the world's knowledge. He popped it into the computer, showed me a few things, and challenged me to search for something interesting, so I typed in "velcro".
Lo and behold, a hit!! A single hit, nonetheless, but a hit. Deep in a botanical article, a one-liner about how some burr seed pod was the inspiration for Velcro.
Before computers were 250 bucks sure, but not anymore. Is the 25 dollar DVD worth it now, you betcha. I have used Britaanica for just perusing for hours and hours just like Wikipedia, it is still a great work.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
the question is not total accuracy at one point in time, but overall accuracy over a long period of time. Wikipedia is constantly changing; Britannica is less frequently updated.
It's a matter of statistics. Is wikipedia getting better, worse, or staying at the same accuracy? We could argue that it's getting better, but let's assume it is staying the same. As quickly as I add my expert knowledge to an article and improve it, you've added your dumbass opinion to another piece (just kidding) and lower the quality. But on average, the quality is the same. Wikipedia still contains an average 4 mistakes per article, they just move around.
In their response to Britannica's charge that they'd sent out text which was not taken from Brittanica, Nature's editors sayDanger, WIll Robinson! This piece of Nature's rebuttal does not speak to Brittanica's charge. As far as we can tell, Nature might sent out edited and possibly unrepresentative text out of context, falsely attributing it to Brittanica, and all we would know is that the reviewer only commented on the Brittanica text.
I submitted this a week or so ago in the hopes that my life goal of getting an article on Slash. It got rejected, and now someone else gets the credit for submitting it. Is this the part where I start ranting and raving about Slashdot editors? I don't know, it's the first time I've ever tried to submit anything. ;-)
As someone who uses both Britannica (the software version of 2006's encyclopedia) as well as Wikipedia almost daily, I have to say that Britannica is sadly out of its league most of the time.
Sure, every now and then I'll encounter something on Wikipedia that is blatantly biased or wrong, but 99% of the time it's updated on the talk pages.
An example comes from a plague I was researching that devastated ancient Athens just as they were gearing up against the Spartans. Britannica is suitably vague about this, but the Wikipedia article on the subject has a great section about how, in 2005, genetic testing proved that it was typhoid fever which devastated Athens at that period. As this was the 2006 Britannica, why didn't it have that information?
A more obvious example of Britannica being less up-to-date is in the country histories articles. They almost all stop at about 1999-2001, without addressing any of the more recent years. Again, in a 2006 publication, why should this be the case? Wikipedia trumps again.
And lastly, people hold Britannica and other encyclopedias up higher than Wikipedia and other open-source content, but they do so erroneously. The point is, encyclopedia articles don't go through enormous peer-review, and are more likely to have errors than a non-vandalized Wikipedia article, simply because there are far fewer contributing eyes scanning the text, and far fewer people reviewing it and keeping it up to date.
Dude, an encyclopedia is a starting point for research. It should give you some ideas on how to proceed next. Nothing else. At that, Britannica is as good as Wikipedia, maybe not as "convenient" because it makes you look for further sources (which, btw, is not a bad thing).
Brittanica: Wikipedia UR teh n00b
Nature: LOL. UR teh suxx0r
Brittanicia: STFU.
Nature: LOL.
"We were discussing the role of encyclopedias in developing a culture of education in the homes of poor parents."
The role, in my experience, is close to zero. Ignorant people don't start being wise book readers just because they have books in their houses.
The error rate is closer than that.
Other studies have reported that Wikipedia entries are two or three times "longer" than Brittanica entries. Wiki's 4 errors per Brittanica's 3 works out to a lower error rate for Wikipedia, on a per-word basis. Further refinement of comparison would require a metric for "conciseness."
Call it Roughly Equal.
One thing that should be said: Encyclopaedia Britannica has sold its print version by sending extremely high-pressure salesmen into poor neighborhoods to imply that if poor families didn't buy Britannica their children would always be ignorant. Parents were often extremely intimidated.
I am one of the children from the neighborhoods of which you speak. I'm the son of a 3rd-generation railroad worker, and I grew up in a rural south Georgia farming town where the local high school dropout rate seldom dips below 50%. My parents hoped for something better for me... and when I was in middle school they saved up what for us was a lot of money, and bought a copy of the World Book encyclopedia for the house.
I got hooked on reading that thing, and in the summer of 1987 I read the entire encyclopedia from A to Z over a few months (not bad for a pre-teen). I can't begin to describe what a profound effect that experience had on me and my development. Had I been born 10 or 20 years later, the Internet could have (MAYBE) fed the same growth and opened the same doors in my mind. However, prior to the 90's all we had were books, and encyclopedias in particular were ideally suited for youthful curiosity.
Today I'm a first-generation college graduate, who's starting salary on his first day in the workforce was greater than my father's after working 30+ years. I'm now an evening student in law school, and plan to move beyond I.T. within the next couple years. It is no exaggeration to say that none of this would have happened had it not been for my parents purchasing that encyclopedia when I was a kid.
I didn't plan to jump into this thread, because I recognize the change of direction that technology introduces and don't cling too hard to the past. However, some douche taking shots at encyclopedia companies for "preying upon" poor people is just too smug and condescending to let slide. Of all the things on which working-class people waste disposable income, it's ridiculous to question educational expenditures... even if the products may not be used to their full potential. Parents who are "intimidated" to spend money on education feel that way out of desire for their children to have a better life. Given that I have worked with so many successful programmers who lack 4-year degrees, what is college if not an expense paid in the face of intimidation?
Don't concern yourself with the plight of people from poor neighborhoods, believe me when I say that we are better off without your help.
Encyclopedia Britannica shoots first! Online searchable media is the future, and the scholastic world still needs to catch up big-time.
Sorry, you lose. :-)
Nature says "While we were quite willing to discuss the issues, the company [Britannica] failed to provide specific details of its complaints" but Brittanica is unable to do so, because Nature will not release detailed information about how it performed the survey.
Wikipedia's useful (though some articles are just an amusing read) and I don't own an encyclopedia... but Nature's hiding of their research methodology is fishy.
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Oddly enough I suspect that Nature is in a similar situation to Britannica.
Britannica started out attempting to provide definitive information on everything and then as this became increasingly impossible it settled on becoming an authoritative general reference, which is where it would like to continue to position itself.
Wikipedia attacks Britannica from below, by providing a generally more approachable style of content (Britannica tends to be exceedingly dry), covering "pop culture" and other things beneath Britannica's notice, and from above by being more timely, and able to (quickly) devote effort to topics of current interest.
Nature, and other scientific journals, are in a similar position. They are unable to cope with the deluge of research being performed and subject to attacks of bias (generally justified -- consider how many key scientific papers could not be published in the key journals of their day owing to challenging entrenched prejudices). We see blatantly fraud managing to slip through peer review processes while at the same time entire groups of scientists are unable to get published in leading journals because their area of research is out of favor with an editorial board.
It's wonderful that you became a reader. However, my experience is that is rare.
first of all, where does anyone say the "accuracy" rates of ANYTHING are 96% or 97% ???!
when talking about percents, it's easy to twist comparisons. what constitutes 100%? and which direction are you going, increasing, or decreasing?
four errors out of four = 100%
three errors out of four = 75%
therefore 100% - 75% = 25% decrease in errors
OR how about:
3/3 = 100%
4/3 = 133%
therefore that is a 33% increase in errors
Oh, so that's why they compared 42 articles.
The reviewer errors are not troubling as they likely infected both sides of the study to a roughly equal degree. However, it appears that the organizers of the study manipulated the data in non trivial and non methodological ways both before and after the reviewers handled the documents. Can't say I agree with that.
Choice excerpts from their rebuttal