Last Updated: Thursday, 15 December 2005, 10:42 GMT
Wikipedia survives research test
The free online resource Wikipedia is about as accurate on science as the Encyclopedia Britannica, a study shows.
Full article at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4530930.stm
"Gordon Joly" gordon.joly@pobox.com wrote in message news:p0623090dbfc711d3a29a@[192.168.116.8]...
Last Updated: Thursday, 15 December 2005, 10:42 GMT
Wikipedia survives research test
The free online resource Wikipedia is about as accurate on science as the Encyclopedia Britannica, a study shows.
Full article at:
That's pretty neat, especially considering that the BBC's own H2G2 could be considered a rival to Wikipedia in certain circles.
Does anybody know if the Nature people have published the errors that they found, so that they could be corrected?
Obviously it would have been really appropriate if they could have corrected them as they went, but apparently the checkers weren't even told that what they were checking came from Wikipedia so as to avoid bias :-)
At 13:43 +0000 15/12/05, Phil Boswell wrote:
"Gordon Joly" gordon.joly@pobox.com wrote in message news:p0623090dbfc711d3a29a@[192.168.116.8]...
Last Updated: Thursday, 15 December 2005, 10:42 GMT
Wikipedia survives research test
The free online resource Wikipedia is about as accurate on science as the Encyclopedia Britannica, a study shows.
Full article at:
That's pretty neat, especially considering that the BBC's own H2G2 could be considered a rival to Wikipedia in certain circles.
Does anybody know if the Nature people have published the errors that they found, so that they could be corrected?
Obviously it would have been really appropriate if they could have corrected them as they went, but apparently the checkers weren't even told that what they were checking came from Wikipedia so as to avoid bias :-) -- Phil [[en:User:Phil Boswell]]
AFAIK, H2G2 was bought (software and all rights) from "The Digital Village" and the software is still in use.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/
See also
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/actionnetwork/
which is an interesting development for the licence fee funded BBC.
Also, BBC News Online is not the same part of the BBC as BBC Online;-)
On 12/15/05, Phil Boswell phil.boswell@gmail.com wrote:
... apparently the checkers weren't even told that what they were checking came from Wikipedia so as to avoid bias :-)
I'm afraid it would have been obvious from the writing which articles were from Wikipedia. The EB is able to provide the facade of accuracy because the writing is so smooth, so you don't expect to find factual errors. In Wikipedia articles, you do, because the writing is often very poor, so the other problems tend to jump off the page.
Sarah
Yes, this makes it rather hard to design a good blinded study. Feeding all text through a dialect-simulator, or better yet an editor that unifies paragraph-length and word choice without altering any facts or much clarity, might help. The design of a decent reference-work comparison study might merit a paper in itself.
SJ
On 12/15/05, slimvirgin@gmail.com slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/15/05, Phil Boswell phil.boswell@gmail.com wrote:
... apparently the checkers weren't even told that what they were checking came from Wikipedia so as to avoid bias :-)
I'm afraid it would have been obvious from the writing which articles were from Wikipedia. The EB is able to provide the facade of accuracy because the writing is so smooth, so you don't expect to find factual errors. In Wikipedia articles, you do, because the writing is often very poor, so the other problems tend to jump off the page.
Sarah _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
-- ++SJ
You're saying run the test through google translator into japanese, then italian, then back to english? That'll produce pretty style-neutral text :D
On 12/15/05, SJ 2.718281828@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, this makes it rather hard to design a good blinded study. Feeding all text through a dialect-simulator, or better yet an editor that unifies paragraph-length and word choice without altering any facts or much clarity, might help. The design of a decent reference-work comparison study might merit a paper in itself.
SJ
On 12/15/05, slimvirgin@gmail.com slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/15/05, Phil Boswell phil.boswell@gmail.com wrote:
... apparently the checkers weren't even told that what they were checking came from Wikipedia so as to avoid bias :-)
I'm afraid it would have been obvious from the writing which articles were from Wikipedia. The EB is able to provide the facade of accuracy because the writing is so smooth, so you don't expect to find factual errors. In Wikipedia articles, you do, because the writing is often very poor, so the other problems tend to jump off the page.
Sarah _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
-- ++SJ _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 12/15/05, SJ 2.718281828@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, this makes it rather hard to design a good blinded study. Feeding all text through a dialect-simulator, or better yet an editor that unifies paragraph-length and word choice without altering any facts or much clarity, might help. The design of a decent reference-work comparison study might merit a paper in itself.
SJ
A program that can edit an article to remove all the verbage and keep the facts is pretty far away, from an AI stand-point... If they had had the time and money, though, I guess they could have had their students read through the articles and simply list each "fact". Then you could get the number of errors per 100 facts. Not quite as easy, though.
Sam
-- Asbestos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Asbestos
At 09:47 -0600 15/12/05, slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/15/05, Phil Boswell phil.boswell@gmail.com wrote:
... apparently the checkers weren't even told that what they were checking came from Wikipedia so as to avoid bias :-)
I'm afraid it would have been obvious from the writing which articles were from Wikipedia. The EB is able to provide the facade of accuracy because the writing is so smooth, so you don't expect to find factual errors. In Wikipedia articles, you do, because the writing is often very poor, so the other problems tend to jump off the page.
Sarah
An example of a publication that is not open to open edit "The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography".
http://www.oup.com/oxforddnb/info/order/print/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Dictionary_of_National_Biography
Priced at 7,500 UK pounds, it may contain errors.
"...but in the months following publication there was occasional criticism of the dictionary in some British newspapers and periodicals for reported factual inaccuracies."
I regard this statement a rather tame....
On Thu, 15 Dec 2005 13:29:42 +0100, Gordon Joly gordon.joly@pobox.com wrote:
Last Updated: Thursday, 15 December 2005, 10:42 GMT
Wikipedia survives research test
The free online resource Wikipedia is about as accurate on science as the Encyclopedia Britannica, a study shows.
Full article at:
Neat, one nit pick though, where to they keep pulling these numbers of the number of contributors from? 13,000 contributors? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics says there are 686,624 users. Now granted not ALL of those have contributed (not constructively anyway), but still...
Sherool wrote:
On Thu, 15 Dec 2005 13:29:42 +0100, Gordon Joly gordon.joly@pobox.com wrote:
Last Updated: Thursday, 15 December 2005, 10:42 GMT
Wikipedia survives research test
The free online resource Wikipedia is about as accurate on science as the Encyclopedia Britannica, a study shows.
Full article at:
Neat, one nit pick though, where to they keep pulling these numbers of the number of contributors from? 13,000 contributors? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics says there are 686,624 users. Now granted not ALL of those have contributed (not constructively anyway), but still...
--[[User:Sherool]]
They may be talking about those who made 5 or more edits in the last month. of which there were 13174 in September 2005, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm
-- Neil
On 12/15/05, Neil Harris neil@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote:
Sherool wrote:
Neat, one nit pick though, where to they keep pulling these numbers of the number of contributors from? 13,000 contributors? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics says there are 686,624 users. Now granted not ALL of those have contributed (not constructively anyway), but still...
They may be talking about those who made 5 or more edits in the last month. of which there were 13174 in September 2005, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm
The volunteer army deserves more credit. Even by accounts-with-5-edits-a-month standards, it should be 15,000 in English [and 30,000 in all languages].
I would peg the # of volunteers 25% higher, since there are slow, steady, excellent contributors, and many active anons. One often finds anons monitoring and maintaining specific pages; I recently put a face to this phenomenon in meeting two professionals, one a businessman and another employed at an international charity, who edit and keep their eye on at least one article in which they are armchair experts. (But "of course" anonymously. Bad enough when someone peeks into your office and sees -- is that a Wikipedia edit page? -- worse yet if you are logged in and it might be construed as a pasttime.)
++SJ
At 00:46 +0100 16/12/05, Heinz wrote:
Gordon Joly schrieb:
The free online resource Wikipedia is about as accurate on science as the Encyclopedia Britannica, a study shows.
There is one mistake in that sentence. It's not THE wikipedia. It's (?) only the en.wikipedia according to that test.
Heinz
Did I "schrieb" that?
Did I write that?
No, I did not. I was quoting BBC News Online.
Sorry for the confusion!