On 9/22/05, Jeff Kinz jkinz@kinz.org wrote:
FYI, FWIW, YMMV:
The "credibility battle" has a distinct trendline:
Since November 2004 I've been capturing two automated news feeds generated by Google News alerts on citations of the Wikipedia and "that other encyclopedia"(E. Britannica).
As the items dribbled in, I eliminated those which were "about" the 'pedias and kept those which "cited" the pedias. **
Here are the results :
From 11/7/2004 to 9/21/2004, citations appearing in an arbitrarily
selected group of news publications [Pubs indexed by Google News] count as follows:***
Wikipedia: 412 ****
Encyclopedia Britannica: 73
Ratio of roughly 5.6 to 1. Call it 11 to 2 for integer only CPU's :)
WP is leading handsomely.
Some thoughts:
- Many of the smaller, Internet-based publications will cite Wikipedia while this is less likely with the major mainstream news outlets. - Britannica is a subscription site, with only a small portion available for free, so the selection is even smaller - Lots of tech sites are in Google News, and Wikipedia excels at tech entries. - Wikipedia pounds other 'pedias when it comes to current events coverage
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)