[WikiEN-l] Nature replies to Britannica

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Sorry if someone posted this already, but I didn't see it.
The current issue of Nature has a reply to Britannica.
It is subscription-only so giving a link won't help.
There is an editorial and a slightly longer reply that
does not need subscription (see link near the end
of the editorial).

Zero.

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Editorial

Nature 440, 582 (30 March 2006) | doi:10.1038/440582b

Britannica attacks
... and we respond.

Last December, Nature published a News story about the accuracy of two
online references sources. We compared the website of an established
publication, Encyclopaedia Britannica, with that of Wikipedia, a new
kind of online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit and update,
regardless of expertise.

The result (see Nature 438, 900–901; 2005) surprised us, and many
others. Forty-two expert reviewers carried out the comparison. After we
had tallied their results, we saw that they had picked up errors (the
great majority of them minor) at a rate of about three per online
Britannica item and about four per Wikipedia item.

Last week, Encyclopaedia Britannica issued a statement
(http://corporate.britannica.com/britannica_nature_response.pdf), and
this week published a half-page advertisement in the London Times
criticizing our study and demanding that we retract our story.

Britannica complains that we did not check the errors that our
reviewers identified, and that some of them are not errors at all. We
disagree with their claims in some of the cases (others are too
specialized for an immediate response), but there is a more important
point to make. Our reviewers may have made some mistakes — we have been
open about our methodology and never claimed otherwise — but the
entries they reviewed were blinded: they did not know which entry came
from Wikipedia and which from Britannica. We see no reason to believe
that any misidentifications of errors would adversely affect one
publication more than the other. And of the 123 purported errors in
question, Britannica takes issue with fewer than half.

Another Britannica criticism concerns the fact that we provided
material from other Britannica publications, such as the Britannica
Book of the Year. This was deliberate: the aim of our story, as we made
clear, was to compare the online material available from Britannica and
Wikipedia. When users search Britannica online, they get results from
several Britannica publications. They have no reason to think that any
one is less reliable than the others. In the case of some year-book
entries, Britannica itself asks readers to reference the articles as
coming from "Encyclopaedia Britannica Online" — exactly the source we
set out to compare.

Other objections are simply incorrect. The company has, for example,
claimed that in one case we sent a reviewer material that did not come
from any Britannica publication. When the company made this point to us
in private we asked for details, but it provided none. Now Britannica
has identified the review in question as being on ethanol. We have
checked the original e-mail that we sent to the reviewer who looked at
the Britannica article on ethanol, and it is clear to us that all the
reviewer's comments refer to specific paragraphs from Britannica.

Our responses to the points raised by Britannica in its original online
posting and in its subsequent advertisement can be found at
http://www.nature.com/press_releases/Britannica_response.pdf. Our
comparison was unbiased, and we reject Britannica's allegation that we
have acted in a dishonest manner. We stand by the story.



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