Wikipedia's Accuracy Compared to Britannica

Raul654 writes "Nature magazine recently conducted a head-to-head competition between Wikipedia and Britannica, having experts compare 42 science-related articles. The result was that Wikipedia had about 4 errors per article, while Britannica had about 3. However, a pair of endevouring Wikipedians dug a little deeper and discovered that the Wikipedia articles in the sample were, on average, 2.6 times longer than Britannica's - meaning Wikipedia has an error rate far less than Britannica's." Interesting, considering some past claims. Story available on the BBC as well.

Dooop

[MullerMn (526350)]

Slashdot Article Compared to Earlier Slashback: Found To Be Identical

Story available here [slashdot.org].

Re:Dooop

[Prospero's Grue (876407)]

Slashdot Article Compared to Earlier Slashback: Found To Be Identical

Yeah, but the Slashdot Article is 1.4 times longer, so it's not as duped as you think...

Re:Not exactly

[irote (834216)]

And it's also nonsense. The Wikipedia article is written flabbily, by a collection of authors, some experts, some not, some good writers, some terrible ones.

The Britannica, on the other hand, is written by someone with clear credentials as an expert, to a word limit, and is then edited for conciseness and clarity. That is to say, the Britannica piece will undoubtedly say more than the Wikipedia piece. The error per word rate in Britannica may be higher, but the error per fact rate is probably much more favourable to Britannica.

Easy example - compare the writing in a mainstream newspaper to a well-written one with tight editorial policies, like the Financial Times or the Economist. Your average Sidney Morning Herald, Guardian or San Francisco Chroncile article is probably longer, but it says less.

Re:Not exactly

[croddy (659025)]

So, what you're saying is that Britannica has a long way to go before it will be useful as a wiki?

Re:Not exactly

[CastrTroy (595695)]

Yeah, but you're paying for britannica. I'd really expect them to have less than 3 errors per article. Wikipedia is a free enclopedia by the people, for the people. It will get better if the community gets bigger. There's a lot of stuff you'll find in wikipedia that you won't find in britannica, because people can write about whatever they want.

Re:Not exactly

[pizzaman100 (588500)]

Yeah, but you're paying for britannica. I'd really expect them to have less than 3 errors per article.

Note that study only picked 42 science articles. This does not mean that britannica has that rate of errors for other diciplines.

Re:Not exactly

[iabervon (1971)]

That is to say, the Britannica piece will undoubtedly say more than the Wikipedia piece.

That's not actually true. Wikipedia's threshold for relevance is lower, so the articles say more, in addition to being less densely written. This is due, to a large extent, because Britannica has to print theirs, so they have pressure to keep things brief, whereas Wikipedia can go into lots of detail. I don't have access to Britannica, but I'm willing to bet that it doesn't explain the Reed-Solomon configuration for error correction on CDs [wikipedia.org]. So chances as that Wikipedia articles have more information in them, although not by as big a factor as the increase in size. Of course, there's no way for us to know at this point the characteristics of the articles that Nature used for this comparison, because they seem to have merged related articles in both cases. For example, most of the content of the Wikipedia "Field Effect Transistor" is in the articles on particular types (MOSFET, JFET, etc.), and the article on Woodward in Britannica must have gotten sections from other articles (e.g., overviews of things he worked on) pulled in if Nature compared versions of remotely similar lengths or scope, since Britannica doesn't break up this topic into articles the same way.

I challenge an assumption

[benhocking (724439)]

You (and implictly the submitter) are assuming longer == more content. Typically, better writers can say more with less words. Of course, more credentialed != better.

Re:I challenge an assumption

[mrogers (85392)]

Unless someone here examines the articles in question, this argument is pointless.

What an accurate and concise summary of Slashdot - you should work for Wikipedia.

Re:I challenge an assumption

[iocat (572367)]

IWAE (I was an editor) and I can say that when writing about a technical subject, it's rare to find a copy-editor (proof reader) who is as technically knowledgeable (for a variety of reasons). This inevitably results in small errors -- and sometimes large ones -- entering the text, as the copy editor tries to make the orginal text flow more in line with the english language, hit certain word counts, avoid widows and orphans, etc. If the author, or a technical editor, doesn't have time to carefully reread the text (which is almost always the case), you end up with errors.

This isn't just a problem with encyclopaedias, of course. Most PhD dissertations are riddled with errors, some very obvious, even though the author may have spent years on the document. (I mean errors that result from trying to convey information, not intentionally included wrong information -- missing words that change the meaning of a sentence to the opposite of what the author intended, dates the contradict other dates on the same page, etc.) The world's an imperfect place.

Re:I challenge an assumption

[shotfeel (235240)]

There's also one other strength of Wikipedia that often gets ignored -links. This makes it an even better starting point than a print dictionary in that more authoritative and in-depth information on anything from the definition of a word to a complex theory is often only a click away.

IOW its not just the information provided, its the linking to more information -something the web was designed for.

Re:Not exactly

[irote (834216)]

What's the content unit? The fact or the word?

As you say, the quality of writing is not what's being examined. We turn to an encyclopedia, whether printed or online, for facts.

For this reason, it's the accuracy of these facts that is of interest to us.

Accept the (indubitably true) proposition that the fact-to-word ratio in Britannica is higher than in Wikipedia, then the submitter's 'argument' is false: dividing the length of an article by the number of errors in it does not give you an average error rate.

A word is neither true nor false, a statement can be.

Re:Not exactly

[Haeleth (414428)]

Accept the (indubitably true) proposition

Your use of language is as careless as that you attribute to Wikipedia's editors. No proposition is "indubitably true", and no proposition can be proven by asserting its truth without providing any sort of argument to support the assertion.

It is plausible that Britannica presents facts more concisely. It is even likely. But unless someone actually

• Defines a "fact", in the context of an encyclopedia article, in an objective and measurable way;
• Devises a methodology for assessing the ratio of facts (thus defined) to words;
• Applies this methodology to a statistically significant selection of articles from Wikipedia;
• Applies the same methodology to a comparable set of articles from Britannica; and
• Publishes their definitions, methodology, and results,

then you simply can not describe the proposition as "true". And even if such a study existed, you would have to be pretty damn sure that its methodology was unassailable before you could consider describing the proposition it supported as "indubitably true".

Re:Not exactly

[flyingsquid (813711)]

I don't know about you, but from the articles I've seen on Wikipedia, they've been quite rich in information.

Of course, there's the issue of the type of information. Wikipedia has a dissertation-length discussions of Half-Life 2 and Babylon 5, for instance, and a meager couple screens devoted to Moby Dick (unless you count the discussions of Moby Dick's influences in Star Trek episodes, Japanese video games and comic books as a serious discussion of the novel).

Though I suppose you could make the argument that this is actually a strength rather than a weakness. Moby Dick may be a masterwork of American fiction, but today, video games and sci-fi soap operas have a vastly greater cultural influence than Herman Melville.

Re:Entries the same length...or not?

[geoffspear (692508)]

Yes, but you're assuming that the rate of errors per article remains constant when the lengths of the articles vary.

Even if you ignore the obvious bias of the people (identified as "Wikipedians") refuting the Nature study, you have to admit their methodology is flawed. If the original study properly controlled for the lngth of articles, you can't refute it by showing that articles they didn't study might vary in length.

Re:Dooop

[ceejayoz (567949)]

Here this was up just yesterday and was just taken takendown.

So you left slander up on the Internet when you could easily have removed it? You're part of the problem!

Without Wiki it WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN UP AT ALL.

And neither would much of the useful content.

Other Encyclopedias don't have problems, anywhere even remotely close to Wiki with its slander and information athentication WARS.

Other encyclopedias don't have much of the more obscure information available in Wikipedia.

Careful with stats...

[erick99 (743982)]

I am not sure that it is reasonable to consider error rate primarily as errors per unit of text. In that case, one could write a submission and then insert a lot of fluff to lower the "error rate." I would consider the absolute amount of errors per submission at least as important as the quantity of errors as a function of quantity of text. Just a thought.

Can't we all just get along?

[typical (886006)]

Other than as a willy-waving metric, it seems that the error count in a tiny sampling of articles isn't useful at *all*.

I mean, it's pretty clear that both Britannica and Wikipedia are useful references. They have different strengths and weaknesses, but neither is gong to be unilaterally better.

Now, I personally use WP exclusively; It's available from anywhere with a web browser, it's free, it covers the sorts of things that I deal with frequently (tech, pop culture, people) and I'm a fan of the open source mentality. For my particular needs, WP is better suited. However, I don't see a need to claim that one is *better*. There are going to be WP articles that are *chock full* of errors on some points or link to sketchy sources, and there are going to be Britannica articles that just don't exist compared to WP or are simply outdated. It doesn't take people very long to figure out which is more appropriate to their uses, because aside from the initially surprising fact (to me, at least) that WP works and doesn't simply fall prey to vandalism, the strengths of the two aren't that hard to figure out. I'm not going to use WP as a primary source for a research paper, but it's going to be the very first reference that I turn to when I want an overview of a topic.

I think that WP still has some challenges to pass -- WP contains articles on specific *products*, which Britannica completely lacks, and at some point, marketers are going to start expressing interest in the ability to freely edit Wikipedia articles on their products. But people that claim that WP is not useful are so clearly demonstrated wrong by a short while of using WP that there isn't any point in even arguing the point. It would be like someone claiming that Google isn't useful because it can return results to pages that aren't peer-reviewed.

Right now, there's a lot of noise over the Seigenthaler incident, but that's a tiny ripple in a vast ocean -- people will find a way to solve problems like this (if not in WP, then in a competing, derived system), just because it's so useful to do so. Reputation systems, a second system that blocks admission of changes until someone reviews them, whatever. We haven't even scratched the surface of systems like this, and their value is clearly phenomenal. I have read far more history and computer science on WP than I've been motived to read about elsewhere for quite some time. I've looked up a number of things that I always wondered about (what "grunge [wikipedia.org]" actually *is*, for example), because WP is so quick to access, so vast, and so readable.

The best thing about all this is that WP is something that nobody (or very few people, at least) were making noise about until recently. The Internet solves problems (communication, latency, ability to provide links to other content, ease of collaboration, access to everyone to try out new system ideas) that allow incredible new systems that have never existed before in humanity's existence, and the number of new (as of yet raw perhaps, unpolished) systems is *exploding*. Search engines are the only thing that was an immediate and obvious application to me when the Web came into being, and even the mechanisms of something like Google were certainly not obvious. In the past few years, we have seen ideas like del.icio.us, yahoo's bundle of services, free webmail, Wikipedia, and so forth come into being. What's even more incredible is that these things are *enabling* technologies. Each one is a tool that allows people to more easily communicate or deal with things, which makes us even *more* powerful and makes it even easier for us to make new tools. If I can freely collaborate without long-distance phone charges with people in Sweden, I expand the number of people that I can share knowledge with. If I can read, at least in a rudimentary fashion, the languages that I can read through use of Babelfish, I have hugely increased the number of documents available to me. If I can take advantage

Re:Careful with stats...

[shaitand (626655)]

We can safely assume the "experts" had moral concerns. Therefore they have corrected all the wikipedia errors leaving ZERO per article. Britanica on the other hand still has 3 per article.

Although, a difference of 1 error per article in lengthy science articles is not substantial enough to pass the margin of error of the experts themselves.

Accuracy

[penguinoid (724646)]

Wikipedia has less errors, you say? We'll be fixing that shortly...
-- The Britanica Team

Re:Accuracy

[LiquidCoooled (634315)]

Don't you mean 'Britannica'?

Sincerely,
A Wiki editor.

ps, we don't hold grudges and most of us will gladly help clean up your mistakes :)

Versatility

[soulsteal (104635)]

Sure they found errors in Wikipedia and Britannica, but which one can you go back to and correct?

Game, set, match!

Re:Versatility

[BushCheney08 (917605)]

...but which one can you go back to and correct?

Both. Doing it to one of them is likely to get you kicked out of the library, though...

Man with one watch ..

[OzPeter (195038)]

One of my fav sayings (which also translates well into a coding practice when people want multiple copies of the same data in separate locations)

"A man with one watch always knows what time it is, but a man with two watches never knows."

Unless of course one of the watches is a nixie watch and that the batteries have run out after 2 days usage, or the cathodes have busted from all that shaking.

Re:Versatility

[mcgroarty (633843)]

Which one is more likely to grow links to goatse.cx between the time you cite it and the time your professor reviews your paper?

Re:Versatility

[bogado (25959)]

Simply cite the revision you used. By this I mean, "Article on frogs on wikipedia on the revision made in 06:31, 17 November 2005 : http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frog&old id=28572307 [wikipedia.org]". If any new information like links to goatse.cx are added the person who is reading you work will know that it was not from that version that you based your work.

Re:Versatility

[vertinox (846076)]

Which one is more likely to grow links to goatse.cx between the time you cite it and the time your professor reviews your paper?

Lets just say I'm banned from using the color copier at my local college library.

Accuracy - Good, Writing Poor

[ehaggis (879721)]

As the article states, the writing style in Wikipedia can be poor. Low diction, poor grammar and bad structure contribute to the chaos.

Most research I do on Wikipedia does not depend on good writing, but accurate information, especially on pop culture items or obscure "geek" subjects. Wikipedia does well in this. I have seen defaced articles "heal" with ten minutes of the incident.

As a contributor to Wikipedia, I am glad it is gaining widespread notoriety and validation.

Informative

[drewzhrodague (606182)]

I find Wikipedia quite informative, and easy to get to. I don't see what the problem is, or why those people want to class-action Wikipedia. I've learned a bunch of things by browsing, and investigating things mentioned in the articles. Even if Wikipedia were a little bit innacurate, it would certainly beat out my first 8 years of education, where I've found almost all of the science I've learned is actually wrong (by talking to scientists, and reading books, and wikipedia).

About the "class action lawsuit"....

[brian0918 (638904)]

The parent referred to this site [wikipediaclassaction.org], which states that the group is gathering complaints to file a class action lawsuit against Wikipedia.

The problem? The people hosting the site are far from unbiased on the topic. The site is hosted by baou.com, which runs QuakeAID [wikipedia.org], a bogus "charity" set up after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake.

Why are they mad at Wikipedia? After the earthquake, a member of QuakeAID with the username Baoutrust used Wikipedia to promote the QuakeAID article and the QuakeAID website. Apparently, this included listing QuakeAID on the list of charities for the tsunami survivors. When their true nature was discovered, they were removed from the list, and they got pissed. Since then, they've been smearing [baou.com] Wikipedia at every possible chance.

Nature editorial asks scientists to contribute

[AxelBoldt (1490)]

Nature also published an editorial [nature.com] which asks scientists to contribute to Wikipedia: "Nature would like to encourage its readers to help. The idea is not to seek a replacement for established sources such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but to push forward the grand experiment that is Wikipedia, and to see how much it can improve. Select a topic close to your work and look it up on Wikipedia. If the entry contains errors or important omissions, dive in and help fix them. It need not take too long. And imagine the pay-off: you could be one of the people who helped turn an apparently stupid idea into a free, high-quality global resource."

Another thing

[Ostien (893052)]

Does Britannica have extencive articles on Lightsaber combat? [wikipedia.org]

Wikipedia: 1
Britannica: 0

Re:Another thing

[laughingcoyote (762272)]

That's all just made up shit, dude. Why would you want that in an encyclopedia??

While I don't have a set of Brittanicas right here, I would guess that you can find references in Brittanica to the plays of Shakespeare, Aphrodite, Zeus, Thor, and The Odyssey.

All of that is "made up shit", but a culture's fiction and mythology is still relevant to a discussion of the culture in question. So why shouldn't Wikipedia, with its quicker-changing nature, have information on more modern fiction and myth?

Hah! "Science" articles!

[ceeam (39911)]

What does Britannica say about "Goatse"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse [wikipedia.org]

Longer article...

[everphilski (877346)]

... doesn't mean a better article. Encyclopedias are meant to be concise and to the point. A starting point for research, not a be-all and end-all. And I don't agree with normalizing errors to the length of the article, it should be the number of errors per article. Just because you wrote more stuff it doesn't give you the leeway to screw up more...

Get your facts info from more than one source

[nysus (162232)]

No resource, no matter who it's written by, is absolutely definitive. Any thorough research will require going to many different sources to arrive at the best approximation of the "truth." Any person who relies on just one source for their information any topic is making a mistake. Wikipedia, Britannica, and other reference works should be considered only as starting points for further research. They should be considered nothing more than signposts for finding your way to other ideas and avenues to explore a topic.

12 % of Nature authors consult Wikipedia weekly

[AxelBoldt (1490)]

Note also that they "surveyed more than 1,000 Nature authors" and found that "more than 70% had heard of Wikipedia and 17% of those consulted it on a weekly basis." I wonder what percentage of Nature authors consult the Encylopaedia Britannica on a weekly basis.

Can't reference Wikipedia because it changes

[nincehelser (935936)]

Wikipedia seems fine for informal use, but how can you possible cite sources with something that is constantly changing?

Re:Can't reference Wikipedia because it changes

[Lorenzarius (765215)]

The current version of an article is changing, but a particular past version is static. If you really need to reference Wikipedia, you can go to the page history page and choose one of the version. They actually have a page on citing Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].

Re:Can't reference Wikipedia because it changes

[Xzzy (111297)]

Shouldn't be citing encyclopedias to begin with. When I was in school, I had teachers that would mark student's work down if they used an encyclopedia as a source.

To my eyes their only legitimite use is for someone new to a subject getting a concentrated overview to get them started with real research.

Wiki has it all....

[Himring (646324)]

No other encyclopedia or would-be encyclopedia covers as many topics as Wikipedia. I've used it to do everything from research SOX regulations for my job, to understanding my favorite online game, DoTA [wikipedia.org] to name it. And they even have a page on mail order brides [wikipedia.org]. Not that I've ever looked into that (god they're hot, and they all have the same name, Elena...).

How are they quantifying "error"?

[kalidasa (577403)]

If the Britannica article misspells 2 words, and the Wikipedia article is based upon an assumption that light travels through the medium of ether, does that mean that Wikipedia has half as many errors as Britannica? This is a lot more complicated than the kind of statistical error analysis these folks are trying for.

Re:How are they quantifying "error"?

[Raul654 (453029)]

They had a seperate category for egregious errors like the latter - of which, (from TFA) 4 were found in Wikipedia and 4 in Britannica

Participation

[shaitand (626655)]

Did the experts correct the errors? I hope so.

Part of the Problem

[Rydia (556444)]

Part of the problem with this study is its subject matter; science-related articles are by and large cut and dry, and only common misconceptions usually are introduced. While one could say this exonerates wikipedia, I'm pretty sure this doesn't say a whole lot. Another problem is that they consider an "omission" an inaccuracy. That doesn't seem like a good standard to hold either publication to.

What about biographies, the pieces more often cited as innacurate? Or political pieces? Or any subject that has any controversy, really.

While it's nice to see that wikipedia is only slightly worse off in science, as the article said, it's still in general poorly written and still contains more errors than brittanica in the least error-prone subject. Hardly a vote of confidence.

Wikipedia needs a disclaimer

[wrook (134116)]

I was thinking something like:

In many of the more relaxed areas of the Internet, Wikipedia has long supplanted the great Encyclopedia Britanica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older more pedestrian work in two important respects.

First, it is slightly cheaper, and secondly it has the words Don't Panic! printed in large friendly letters on its cover.

Well, OK... except for the Don't Panic part...

Comparable length entries were judged

[Acy James Stapp (1005)]

From the results page at http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/multimedia/ 438900a_m1.html [nature.com]

"All entries were chosen to be approximately the same length in both encyclopaedias."

Are you all idiots? I guess I don't really need to ask that question.

Why just science articles?

[ThinkFr33ly (902481)]

Seems to me that science articles might not be the place category of articles to use to judge the accuracy of Wikipedia. I suspect that most people contributing to the science articles have a pretty good knowledge of the subjects in question... they're not things that most people know a lot about. Acheulean industry? Kinetic isotope effect? Meliaceae? Huh?

Where I suspect more errors abound in wikipedia is in the articles about things that a lot of people think they know a lot about, but in fact don't have any idea what they're talking about. Or topics in which people have a vested interest in misinforming people. (Political topics, for example.)

Honestly, a better comparison would have been a sampling of 100 or so randomly selected entries. Confining it to just science articles seems like an attempt to misrepresent the accuracy of wikipedia.

Re:More words == lower error rate?

[Phreakiture (547094)]

So if I go to Wikipedia and type the word "gibblefinch" a few thousand times into an article, I can reduce its error rate?

Only if that is what the article should say, and saying so is useful to someone looking up whatever topic it is you are looking up and finding the aforementioned gibblefinch storm. If, on the other hand, it is not useful or relevant, then not, it would tend to increase the error rate, or at lease lower the signal to noise ratio, rather greatly.

Re:Wikipedia

[Raul654 (453029)]

Look for yourself at the abortion article [wikipedia.org]. It's a properly referenced, neutral article on abortion. The people who wrote it were clever, in that they forked off a seperate article on the "Abortion controversy" (thus moving the debate elsewhere).