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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.
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.
If I was in a workplace and needed to research something, chances are that I wouldn't use EB, because I'd want more specific detail than an encyclopedia could give me.
Wikipedia quite often gives me enough to then go searching more of Google.
I agree with you 100%. I had a discussion on this very topic last week with some friends. One of them was concerned that Wikipedia will eventually cause Britannia (and the others) to be pushed out of business and when she does need more and better info than Wikipedia can provide there will be no other sources. An interesting thought.
What if research libraries no longer have for-profit encyclopedias?
After some though we realised that encyclopedias are not really primary references anyway. Wikipedia is good enough (even with jackasses vandalising pages) to get you to the proper primary references to continue research and as such serves its function weel. It is certainly good enough to settle day-to-day curioisity and is an excellen primer for more detailed research.
Send a donation to Wikipedia, they deserve a little love.
That depends. When the DJ John Peel died, it was on Wikipedia as soon as I'd heard. Naomi Campbell's recent arrest is listed in her Wikipedia Bio.
For me, it's also about the sheer volume of Wikipedia. Does Britannica have entries on bands like The Secret Machines, or the Dogme 95 cinema movement, the Cloudy Bay vineyard or the village of Pewsey?
I wish there was a better editing mechanism, particularly to keep vandals out.
That it has a good reputation?
Yes, and that it is supposedly "Peer Reviewed" by subject matter experts. The final leg on the tripod, is that it has a centralized control system to restrict who can change the articles.
These are all seen as essential to the process of providing reliable information.
What we're seeing here is a challenge to accepted methods of producing an encyclopedia. To make it more interesting, we're seeing it happen between the two best examples of each method. ON the one hand you have old school, "Cathedral" style control of authorship, and on the other you have an Open source style Bazaar. It's a battle not of publications, but of ideologies.
I think the killer feature is timeliness of the articles.
I've been at schools whose most recent encyclopedias were purchased in the 1960's. It's not fun to be doing research on the moon in the early 1990's and the most recent article you can find talks about the "Wild Dream" of putting a man on the moon.
That said, I also learned early on that aside form articles going out of date, no encyclopedia is really all that more reliable than Wikipedia. The main reason Britannica has such a great reputation isn't because of any gold standard of accuracy, but because it supposedly does a good job of minimizing obvious bias in the articles.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
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.
Now that's a very different statement than the one they brought out in response to Britannia's allegations that talks about 'chosen excerpts'. I don't think most people would have a problem with the amalgamation of articles, but the arbitrary cutting of articles is a very different story. And could be used by an editor or journalist (i say 'could be' rather than 'were') to promote their own agenda on the subject.
This is obviously a joke, but I've done a bit (not a huge amount) of editing on Wikipedia, and I've got into the habit of looking for the 'edit' tab whenever I see a mistake on any website. I want to participate, dammit! This isn't 1995 any more.
Indeed. Nevertheless it ought to be said that a product - and a business model - which survives for 240 years has done pretty well. Nothing lasts forever. Brittanica may have had its day, but it was a good long day while it lasted.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
From Wikipedia, "The Britannica was an important early English-language general encyclopedia and is still regarded as one of the most important reference books in the English language". About 2 pages of text at 1024x768 with a lively history and current direction the privately held company is heading.
Britannica, not a single word on perhaps the most important contribution to encyclopedia since Britannica. In a word disturbing.
However, I was surprized at how cheap Encyclopedia Britannica has become, I can remember when the CD version came on like 4 discs and cost 100 bucks. Wikipedia has to be the instigator of the price drop, if there were a level playing field I bet the same thing would of happened to windows when linux came out. An open API would be a cool punishment for Microsoft in any future antitrust cases.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Cool funny t-shirts for geeks, gamers and everyone else
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.