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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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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
The key point in all of this is that the study was done blind. Reviewers did not know (though they COULD have checked) which source their article was from. Wikipedia showed more errors, but only 33% more per article than Brittanica at the rate of 4 per. Wikipedia is an astounding resource, and I think it moves Brittanica into a secondary role. What I would find very interesting would be a Brittanica effort to copy-edit, fact-check, and release a dead-tree Wikipedia (based on featured articles and whatever others are needed for context). I know I'd buy it!
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.
I'd like to point out something even more disturbing. When Nature was originally questioned they released a MS WORD file. In the file they claimed that they chose articles of same length:
x tref/438900a-s1.doc
e sponse.pdf
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/e
"Only entries that were approximately the same length in both encyclopaedias were selected."
But when Britannica disputed this, nature replied:
http://www.nature.com/press_releases/Britannica_r
"In a small number of cases, to ensure comparable lengths,
we provided reviewers with chosen excerpts, not full
articles"
That's the smoking gun, they were not truthful about this.
But this is absolutely devastating:
One Nature reviewer was sent only the 350-word introduction to Encyclopædia Britannica's
6,000-word article on lipids. For Nature to have represented Britannica's extensive coverage of
the subject with this short squib was absurd, and it invalidated the findings of omissions
alleged by the reviewer, since those matters were covered in sections of the article he or she
never saw.
As much as I love wikipedia, Nature should save it's integrity and retract the article!
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.
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
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 key point in all of this is that the study was done blind. Reviewers did not know (though they COULD have checked) which source their article was from. Wikipedia showed more errors, but only 33% more per article than Brittanica at the rate of 4 per."
The 33% does not make much sense if we do not know the number of articles that we wrongly found to contain errors - even if the study was done blind.
My point is that if for example these false errors constitute one per article for both Wikipedia and Brittanica, then the difference would suddenly be 50% (2 errors per Brittanica article and 3 errors per Wikipedia art.).
In my opinion Nature has not refuted the critique against the study until they have quantified the number of false positives. Without this number they have no basis for claiming that "...the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three."
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.
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).
Interestingly, Brittanica argues that 33% more constitutes a significant quantity of errors, but that means that brittanica's 75% of the wikipedia total is also a significant quantity of errors by brittanica's own admission.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I've a strong sentimental streak for artifacts myself, but in this case I've got to disagree.
For $1000, you can buy several cheap laptops *and* an electronic encyclopedia and carry one around in a backpack.
I grew up with paper encyclopedias, but always found them almost completely useless. Full text search makes any reference an order of magnitude more useful. Being able to access it from anywhere adds even more value.
If you ask me, an electronic copy of a reference is worth far more than the paper copy was ever worth. (Bringing an encyclopedia up from worthless to worth-pocket-change. Why on earth they were able to convince people to pay thousands of dollars for eternally outdated, so-brief-it's-usually-useless, often wrong and always incomplete information in the first place is a mystery. I'd happy trade an encyclopedia for its weight in specific, in-depth, reference material on almost any subject.)