theage.com.au — The scientific magazine "Nature" has compared 42 articles in both the encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Experts in their field were given the task to check for factual errors. To the surprise of nature, both encyclopedias were containing similar amounts of errors.
Dec 14, 2005 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountDec 14, 2005
Considering the fact that probably 70% of the info in wikipedia was obtained from Britannica, this doesn't surprise me.....
essrogDec 14, 2005
"60% of stuff on wikipedia are simply copy pasted from other encyclopedias anyway."How would you come up with that number? Especially if Wikipedia is expanding and evolving constantly?Is that a made-up assertion, or is it a copy-paste of someone else's made-up assertion?
awright38Dec 14, 2005
The more people who use wiki's the more solid they will become. They are as reliable as society wants them to be.
caughtthinkingDec 14, 2005
With history especially the Wikipedia has an opportuinity to excel. When history is written by the victors AND the losers, it becomes more objective. Is it there yet? probably not. like the creator said, its' definitely a work in progress.
Closed AccountDec 15, 2005
"Wikipedia is free! Free is good!"But not perfect, yet Wiki fanatics try to convince everyone that Wikipedia is problem free.
michaelstoneDec 15, 2005
Whiterabbit:Generally, at my school at least, they frequently discourage use of encyclopedias for any current topic (i.e. science or recent events), since these are often out of date anyway. I personally would encourage people to use recent peer-reviewed journals, and possibly an encyclopedia or RECENT book to supplement that as background, but knowing that it's likely the two will differ.And although Wikipedia is generally right, you still may get the one article that someone recently vandalized, and if you have no knowledge in the subject beforehand, how would you know? The only thing better about Wikipedia is that it uses the vernacular more often, hence, it's easier to read.
michaelstoneDec 15, 2005
Streetstealth, thanks for aiding my point. I've never used an encyclopedia in a citation since, maybe 6th or 7th grade. They're not really cite-worthy, since all they do is condense information that they cite.On the topic of that "kapitalism" site, I decided to check it out in IE. Oddly, the "this is page is not compatible with IE" is false, because it worked fine. Looked the same to me.
perfect13thstepDec 15, 2005
"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."<a class="user" href="http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/15/1352207">http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/15/1352207</a>
shmoovioDec 16, 2005
NPR did a story on this today, which includes an editor from Nature, talking about the study: <a class="user" href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5055388">http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5055388</a>If you care.