Brian wrote:
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. With Maveric149's help, I did:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28news%29#Nature_follow...
Result: Average article size for Wikipedia: 6.80 KB; Britannica: 2.60 KB. Number of errors per 2KB for Wikipedia: 1; Britannica: 6.
Put another way: Wikipedia has 4 errors to their 3; our articles were also 2 1/2 times longer on average.
True as this may be, there is no need for a campaign of spin doctoring.
I think that the "Nature" article was largely sympathetic. Our best response would be to review the articles surveyed to make whatever corrections are needed, or even to make corrections that they failed to notice as well. Once this is done it could be brought to the attention of the "Nature" staff and a challenge issued to see how long it takes EB to make its corrections. 8-)
Ec