Post-post addendum

And after my discussion below, this seems a necessary addition:

Internet encyclopaedias go head to head

Jimmy Wales’ Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries, a Nature investigation finds.

The meat of the story is:

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.

The average number of errors per article in each? 3 per article reviewed in Britannica, 4 per article in Wikipedia. “AHA!” say critics. “The Wikipedia is worse!” Except, of course…the wikipedia can be fixed. Brittanica is wrong forever.

Here’s the full list of errors from each article…it would be interesting to revisit these and see if the wikipedia has been corrected.

Entry Encyclopaedia Britannica inaccuracies Wikipedia inaccuracies
Acheulean industry 1 7
Agent Orange 2 2
Aldol reaction 4 3
Archimedes’ principle 2 2
Australopithecus africanus 1 1
Bethe, Hans 1 2
Cambrian explosion 10 11
Cavity magnetron 2 2
Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan 4 0
CJD 2 5
Cloud 3 5
Colloid 3 6
Dirac, Paul 10 9
Dolly 1 4
Epitaxy 5 2
Ethanol 3 5
Field effect transistor 3 3
Haber process 1 2
Kinetic isotope effect 1 2
Kin selection 3 3
Lipid 3 0
Lomborg, Bjorn 1 1
Lymphocyte 1 2
Mayr, Ernst 0 3
Meliaceae 1 3
Mendeleev, Dmitry 8 19
Mutation 8 6
Neural network 2 7
Nobel prize 4 5
Pheromone 3 2
Prion 3 7
Punctuated equilibrium 1 0
Pythagoras’ theorem 1 1
Quark 5 0
Royal Greenwich Observatory 3 5
Royal Society 6 2
Synchrotron 2 2
Thyroid 4 7
Vesalius, Andreas 2 4
West Nile Virus 1 5
Wolfram, Stephen 2 2
Woodward, Robert Burns 0 3

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Published:
12.16.05 / 6am
Category:
Digital Culture, Library Issues