--- "Daniel P. B. Smith" <wikipedia2006(a)dpbsmith.com> wrote:
...was that they thought it was advantageous to
respond to it at all.
Their response struck me as being lame and as tending to call
attention to the very things they'd just as soon have people forget:
that Nature, which has a stellar reputation among its readership,
even put Britannica and WIkipedia in the same category.
It is as if Nature were to say "Britannica eats shit and bays at the
moon," and Britannica were to respond by saying "That conclusion is
false, because Nature's research was invalid. We don't eat nearly as
much shit as Nature claims we eat, and some of what we ate, which
Nature imprecisely referred to as 'shit,' was actually putrescent
offal, and as for baying at the moon, we take issue with that
characterization of our vocalizations, and anyway we only do it when
the moon is full, which is less than 3% of the time. So, when Nature
says we eat shit and bay at the moon, our response is that we do not
eat shit and bay at the moon, so when you think of eating shit and
baying at the moon, don't think of us, and when you think of us,
don't think of eating shit and baying at the moon, because it is
really not very true at all, hardly. Eating shit. Baying. Moon. Not
us. Not really. Not much. Did I mention we don't eat shit and bay at
the moon? Even though Nature says we do?"
I thought the same thing, but without the hilarious analogy. They also created a strawman
argument
; implying that Nature was dishonest when it did not exclusively use the adult version of
Encyclopedia Britannica when the study was very clearly comparing the online edition of
Britannica's products with Wikipedia. Not to mention that the reviewers were blind to
the source
of what they were reading and thus there was little to no opportunity for bias on that
level. Nor
did EB even try to prove actual bias for Wikipedia by comparing reviewers comments on the
Wikipedia version vs what the acticle said and what the real facts were. They just implied
bias.
That said, I really would have liked to see a more substantial study done; a 42 topic
comparison
is very small and they were only looking for errors. Being comprehensive is almost as
important.
Readability, layout, user-friendliness, links to other topics (esp subtopics that go into
more
detail) is also important.
--- mav
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