Lest anyone think WP only gets bad press, there was a nice article in the New York Times this morning on the front of the Science section about the WP v. EB comparison. Among other things, it features the fact that the prestigious reviewer of one of our articles had a similar error to the one criticized WP for in his own book on the subject (when asked about this, he notes that it must be a typographical error -- that's gotta sting!), and notes that "many of the purported blunders seem open to debate."
At times the author seems downright explicitly against the model of EB: "The idea that perfection can be achieved solely through deliberate effort and centralized control has been given the lie in biology with the success of Darwin and in economics with the failure of Marx."
The author notes that even though one can write really silly things on WP articles, they generally get cleaned up pretty quickly.
He ends on a pretty positive note: "Whatever their shortcomings, neither encyclopedia appears to be as error-prone as one might have inferred from Nature, and if Britannica has an edge in accuracy, Wikipedia seems bound to catch up."
Check it out: George Johnson, "The Nitpicking of the Masses vs. the Authority of the Experts" ''New York Times'' (January 3, 2006). http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/03/science/03comm.html
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