David Gerard wrote:
http://www.smartmoney.com/esquire/index.cfm?Story=20051215wikipedia
Presumably the print version is available soon or now.
The print version has been available on newsstands for over a month. The Signpost reported on this, including our failure to correct the number of Encyclopædia Britannica articles, several weeks ago.
Speaking of Britannica, our article about them needs some serious work. I pointed out some serious problems with the history narrative on the talk page recently, but nobody has yet done the research to tackle the problem. The article also suffers from serious pro-Wikipedia bias in spots. Dealing with the recent Nature study, for example, is it more neutral to throw in out of the blue that "Wikipedia is almost as accurate as Britannica" or would something along the lines of "Britannica remains more accurate than Wikipedia" be better?
--Michael Snow
Michael Snow wrote:
Dealing with the recent Nature study, for example, is it more neutral to throw in out of the blue that "Wikipedia is almost as accurate as Britannica" or would something along the lines of "Britannica remains more accurate than Wikipedia" be better?
Well, to stick to sourceable claims in the form of direct quotes, we could say: -- According to the journal _Nature_, "Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries" [http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html].
-Mark
Delirium wrote:
Michael Snow wrote:
Dealing with the recent Nature study, for example, is it more neutral to throw in out of the blue that "Wikipedia is almost as accurate as Britannica" or would something along the lines of "Britannica remains more accurate than Wikipedia" be better?
Well, to stick to sourceable claims in the form of direct quotes, we could say: -- According to the journal _Nature_, "Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries" [http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html].
That's probably much better because it leaves it to a neutral third party to make the comparison. But does any such comparison need to be in an article about EB? There is no doubt that writing about Wikipedia is encyclopedic, but it's too easy to fall into the trap that people writing their own biographies fall into.
When it comes to the article about Wikipedia maybe we should ask several outside editors to write it, ensuring that a variety of POVs are represented. The resulting set of articles could be relatively uneditable.
Ec