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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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links for 2005-12-16
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Where I agree with Michael Gorman
No, the world is not ending, I simply was convinced by kgs’s recent post. I expected to find the article she quoted from and rant again about Gorman’s lack of technological understanding.
Instead, I’m going to agree with him.
On one, very small point. And probably not in the manner he’d like.
In an article in the San Fransisco Chronicle, Gorman is quoted as follows:
“If you look at the Encyclopedia Britannica, you can be fairly sure that somebody writing an article is an acknowledged expert in that field, and you can take his or her words as being at least a scholarly point of view,” said Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Association and dean of library services at Cal State Fresno. “The problem with an online encyclopedia created by anybody is that you have no idea whether you are reading an established person in the field or somebody with an ax to grind. For all I know, Wikipedia may contain articles of great scholarly value. The question is, how do you choose between those and the other kind?”
Gorman thinks the answer for academia lies in encouraging students to think critically. “Anyone involved in higher education will tell you one of the biggest problems is uncritical acceptance (by students) of anything that’s online,” he said.
It’s that last line that I agree with, but I’d like to make an addendum. I’d prefer to say “Anyone involved….will tell you that one of the biggest problems is uncritical acceptance.”
Period.
What I want to know is: why should we be teaching our students to blindly accept anything? When we’ve had example after example after example of print sources being spurious, why should we not be teaching students to verify their research no matter what the source. That’s certainly what I’m teaching…verification is evaluation as it relates to information. Blind trust of any source is a problem.
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links for 2005-12-15
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With all apologies…
…but this is just too good to not post.
Here’s just one very, very small piece of this brilliant rant:
And guess who’s stealing Christmas, according to Gibson. Go on — guess. “A cabal of secularists, so-called humanists, trial lawyers, cultural relativists, and liberal, guilt-wracked Christians — not just Jewish people.†(Emphasis mine. Pure, unadulterated anti-semitism, his.) A cabal? Are you fucking kidding me?
and
But you boys at FOX still freak out every year about how everyone’s out to get your special trees. This is really the most important thing you have to talk about? Whether Target says Happy Holidays or Merry Christmas? Here’s a brainstorm: there’s a fucking war on. Our soldiers are out there dying while you guys do your 14th live feed of the day from WalMart to show us what good little consumers we are. What Would Jesus Do? He’d jump over that newsdesk and kick your ass for that shit. Are you sure you want to hang your journalism credentials on a story about what some guy calls a tree?
Today there is a cyber protest going on in support of Dean Grey, a group of mashup artists that produced the American Edit. American Edit is a mashup album of works with the Green Day album American Idiot.
As I support the ability of artists to reappropriate works in the production of new art, and this work cannot possibly interfere with the sales of the Green Day album, I suggest that everyone take a listen. It’s brilliant stuff.
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Yahoo! buys Del.icio.us
Interesting…Yahoo! first buys flickr, and now del.icio.us.
Trying to guess the purposes of these large tech companies is a bit like guessing where a penny will land when dropped from a plane, but it’s clear that Yahoo! is trying very hard to be a Web 2.0 company.
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Gaming in Libraries
Some really excellent blogging from Jenny over atTheShiftedLibrarian on the Gaming, Learning and Libraries conference.
More (since these people are all incredibly cool and are tagging like crazy) on technorati and flickr. Such a great topic! Here in my academic library, I’m not often jealous of public libraries. Here’s one opportunity for me to be so, since I don’t eeeeeeeeeever see us ordering games and game systems. I hope that I’m wrong, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
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Nacho Libre!
I have found a new hero for our time. A hero that will show us the way…light our path….and deliver us from evil.
That hero is Nacho Libre.
Jack Black as a 1970’s era luchador? Yes, please!
Check out this interview, as well as yet another amazing pic. It’s directed by Jared Hess, he-of-napoleon-dynamite fame, and co-written by Mike White, who gave us School of Rock.
Plus, you know: LUCHA!
I’m so there.