[Foundation-l] Closer look at Nature's results: Average article size for Wikipedia: 6.80 KB; Britannica: 2.60 KB. Number of errors per 2KB for Wikipedia: 1; Britannica: 6.5

[G L]

2005/12/15, Brian <brian0918 at gmail.com>:
>
> 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.


In fact, it seems they did look at the size. If you look carefully at the
top of the list of articles reviewed by Nature, you will find the following
sentence :

All entries were chosen to be approximately the same length in both
encyclopaedias.

It could even be argued that this bias in the selection actually improved
Wikipedia's performance by screening out a number of poorer articles.

GL