Below is a letter that Britannica sent out today to some of its customers, in response to the December Nature article comparing the accuracy of articles in Wikipedia and Britannica. A more detailed review of the Nature study, including responses to each alleged error and omission, is linked from the front page of www.eb.com.
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Because you're a valued Britannica customer, I'm writing to you today about
a subject that has received widespread news coverage - it is a subject that's being taken very seriously by all of us at Encyclopædia Britannica and one on which we have worked extensively with our editors, contributors, and advisors for many weeks.
In one of its recent issues, the science journal Nature published an article that claimed to compare the accuracy of the online Encyclopædia Britannica with Wikipedia, the Internet database that allows anyone, regardless of knowledge or qualifications, to write and edit articles on any subject. Wikipedia had recently received attention for its alleged inaccuracies, but Nature's article claimed that Britannica's science coverage was only slightly more accurate than Wikipedia's.
Arriving amid the revelations of vandalism and errors in Wikipedia, such a finding was, not surprisingly, big news. Perhaps you even saw the story yourself. It's been reported around the world.
Those reports were wrong, however, because Nature's research was invalid. As our editors and scholarly advisers have discovered by reviewing the research in depth, almost everything about the Nature's investigation was wrong and misleading. Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannica were not inaccuracies at all, and a number of the articles Nature examined were not even in the Encyclopædia Britannica. The study was so poorly carried out and its findings so error-laden that it was completely without merit.
Since educators and librarians have been among Britannica's closest colleagues for many years, I would like to address you personally with an explanation of our findings and tell you the truth about the Nature study.
Almost everything Nature did showed carelessness and indifference to basic research standards. Their numerous errors and spurious procedures included the following:
* Rearranging, reediting, and excerpting Britannica articles. Several of the "articles" Nature sent its outside reviewers were only sections of, or excerpts from Britannica entries. Some were cut and pasted together from more than one Britannica article. As a result, Britannica's coverage of certain subjects was represented in the study by texts that our editors never created, approved or even saw. * Mistakenly identifying inaccuracies. The journal claimed to have found dozens of inaccuracies in Britannica that didn't exist. * Reviewing the wrong texts. They reviewed a number of texts that were not even in the encyclopedia. * Failing to check facts. Nature falsely attributed inaccuracies to Britannica based on statements from its reviewers that were themselves inaccurate and which Nature's editors failed to verify. * Misrepresenting its findings. Even according to Nature's own figures, (which grossly exaggerated the number of inaccuracies in Britannica) Wikipedia had a third more inaccuracies than Britannica. Yet the headline of the journal's report concealed this fact and implied something very different.
Britannica also made repeated attempts to obtain from Nature the original data on which the study's conclusions were based. We invited Nature's editors and management to meet with us to discuss our analysis, but they declined.
The Nature study was thoroughly wrong and represented an unfair affront to Britannica's reputation.
Britannica practices the kind of sound scholarship and rigorous editorial work that few organizations even attempt. This is vital in the age of the Internet, when there is so much inappropriate material available. Today, having sources like Britannica is more important than ever, with content that is reliable, tailored to the age of the user, correlated to curriculum, and safe for everyone.
Whatever may have prompted Nature to do such careless and sloppy research, it's now time for them to uphold their commitment to good science and retract the study immediately. We have urged them strongly to do so.
We have prepared a detailed report that describes Britannica's thorough (7,000 words) analysis of the Nature study. I invite you to download it from our Web site at www.eb.com.
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