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.

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to sketchy sources, and there are going to be Britannica articles that just don't exist compared to WP or are simply outdated.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

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...

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?

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...

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.

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.

Participation

[shaitand (626655)]

Did the experts correct the errors? I hope so.

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.

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)]

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: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).