[WikiEN-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

[MacGyverMagic/Mgm]

Please let us know the links to the slashdot stories.
Nature stated the articles were of similar length. Are you suggesting
they were wrong?

Mgm

On 12/15/05, Brian <brian0918 at gmail.com> 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-up:__How_do_the_article_sizes_compare.3F
>
> 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.
>
>
> Can someone please check my math, I did this pretty fast, and was half
> asleep :)  It's not 100% accurate, but I was only going for a ballpark
> estimate.  Note: we copied the displayed WP text, not the edit box text,
> and removed the TOC, See also, references, external links, and any other
> big tables or lists. The WP text came from just before the Nature
> article was published.
>
> Raul654 and I separately submitted stories to Slashdot, and I would
> suggest anyone willing do something similar. The more requests they have
> for this, the more likely they are to accept it.
>
> brian0918
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