we just had someone on the de mailinglist who purposely modified four articles and introduced a mistake in each of them.
That's nice.
He also told us which articles he modified and claimed that none of the mistakes was detected by now.
Could it perhaps be that he was trusted to not do that (misplaced trust if you ask me).
I checked three of the articles he was right with his claim.
That's nice too.
In the german article about "consumer surplus" the error was there for about 9 (!) days before I removed the nonesense. In other articles the errors were there for more than 9 days.
A whole nine days? Woa, that's like incredible. I would not believe it. Now, a year would be a real challenge.
I agree with most of what you wrote, but I think it is a mistake to believe that we have any kind of review system which is on par (wrt error elimination) with a real peer review.
A real peer review is done by people who are paid. We are volunteers, and while some people might think our work worthless, we don't.
At least my experience is that the probability for finding a mistake in Wikipedia is by far higher than for Britannica.
And britannica has been around what, 100+ years?
best regards, Marco
Marco, tell your friend next time he wants to experiment, to use the sandbox.
And if you like Britannica so much, then, it's there for you to use. Oh, and I forgot, you have to pay to read Britannica articles. (look up Blade Runner, the movie)
Now, granted, the review on W takes more time, but we don't release every year, we release constantly.
There is a program afoot to make a printed wikipedia, and I am sure tht your attention to detail and factual accuracy would be extremely valuable in reaching the completion of the project.
===== Chris Mahan 818.943.1850 cell chris_mahan@yahoo.com chris.mahan@gmail.com http://www.christophermahan.com/
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