2005/12/15, Brian brian0918@gmail.com:
Nature has a special report at http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html , detailing the results of an accuracy comparison between WP and EB. While the Wikipedia articles often contained more inaccuracies than Britannica's, they don't look at the article sizes in each case.
In fact, it seems they did look at the size. If you look carefully at the top of the list of articles reviewed by Nature, you will find the following sentence :
All entries were chosen to be approximately the same length in both encyclopaedias.
It could even be argued that this bias in the selection actually improved Wikipedia's performance by screening out a number of poorer articles.
GL