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_follo…
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