Wikipedia's Accuracy Compared to Britannica 418
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 (Score:4, Funny)
Story available here [slashdot.org].
Not exactly (Score:3, Informative)
That part's new.
Re:Not exactly (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Not exactly (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, and terrible contributions gets edited over time as the article stabilizes.
The error per word rate in Britannica may be higher, but the error per fact rate is probably much more favourable to Britannica.
So you have no idea or basis for this claim?
Easy example - compare the writing in a mainstream newspaper to a well-written one with tight editorial policies, like the Fina
Re:Not exactly (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not exactly (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Not exactly (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not exactly (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not exactly (Score:3, Informative)
I count five screens of information, not counting the "Selected adaptations and references" section, which certainly references more than Star Trek. Meanwhile, I went searching on britannica.com and found that there was no article at all on Moby Dick. There was an article on Herman Melville, though. It's 2845 words long. I admit that beats Wikipedia's, which is 883 not counting the bibliography. But combined with the text of the Moby Dick entry, that's 2672 words total, again not counting the (not just
Re:Not exactly (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not exactly (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I challenge an assumption (Score:5, Funny)
What an accurate and concise summary of Slashdot - you should work for Wikipedia.
Re:I challenge an assumption (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway, while Wikipedia may have fewer errors per word, it is possible to say that EB is probably written more concisely, and therefore may have a greater fact density per word, rendering the comparsion invalid.
More importantly, though, I want to know about the QUALITY of the errors. Are the Wiki erros typos, and the EB errors
Re:I challenge an assumption (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
IOW its not just the information provided, its the linking to more information -something the web was designed for.
Re:Not exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Entries the same length...or not? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but the Slashdot Article is 1.4 times longer, so it's not as duped as you think...
Re:Dooop (Score:3, Insightful)
Here this was up just yesterday and was just taken takendown. YES it was up on the web for a while before being noticed. I think the point is it should not have been up AT ALL. There is nothing inpressive in how long or how fast something slanderous and stupid was caught. Without Wiki it WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN UP AT ALL.
Under the rock group Dokken.
In 2005, Don Dokken and Jani Lane of a band called Warrant participated in a civil union ceremony to
Re:Dooop (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Dooop (Score:3, Insightful)
If you had a system where changes and additions had to be approved by other users before being applied to an article you would still get slander but in a different form -- slanderous people and trolls would simply watch the "waiting for approval" list and deny legitimate submissions while allowing their troll friends' slanderous submissions. Plus you'd have to worry
Re:Dooop (Score:3, Interesting)
More words == lower error rate? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:More words == lower error rate? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:More words == lower error rate? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:More words == lower error rate? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:More words == lower error rate? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:More words == lower error rate? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:More words == lower error rate? (Score:3, Interesting)
Careful with stats... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Careful with stats... (Score:2, Insightful)
Can't we all just get along? (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
-- The Britanica Team
Re:Accuracy (Score:5, Funny)
Sincerely,
A Wiki editor.
ps, we don't hold grudges and most of us will gladly help clean up your mistakes
Wikipedia (Score:2)
Re:Wikipedia (Score:5, Informative)
Versatility (Score:5, Insightful)
Game, set, match!
Re:Versatility (Score:5, Funny)
Both. Doing it to one of them is likely to get you kicked out of the library, though...
Man with one watch .. (Score:4, Funny)
"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 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Versatility (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Versatility (Score:3, Informative)
if something matters enough that you are citing sources then you REALLY should be citing primary sources from the appropriate field.
Re:Versatility (Score:5, Funny)
Lets just say I'm banned from using the color copier at my local college library.
Evolving vs. Static (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you would also need to take into consideration the maturity of the chosen articles, since Wikipedia's content evolves continuously rather than on set publication dates. Newer articles probably would have a higher error rate.
Re:Evolving vs. Static (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the choice to use scince-related articles slants the results. There are not a lot of people who feel capable of writing about Epitaxy. On the other hand, those subjects that are more accessible to a large group of people, such as Ethanol or Thyroid have significantly higher error rates. I think it is probable that more popular subjects would have a higher error count due to 'urban myth' being included as fact.
Accuracy - Good, Writing Poor (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
About the "class action lawsuit".... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Informative (Score:3, Interesting)
Speaking of poor writing.... (Score:2, Insightful)
This confused me, until I realized that single-sentenc
Nature editorial asks scientists to contribute (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nature editorial asks scientists to contribute (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Nature editorial asks scientists to contribute (Score:3, Interesting)
every week to remove the changes made by
people who aren't experts in the field?
That's why I gave up on it -- it's like
trying to build a sandcastle too close to the
water's edge. I'd rather use my time to
create something that won't be destroyed
after a month or two.
Re:Nature editorial asks scientists to contribute (Score:3, Informative)
If you as a scientist find a glaring problem that is extensive, then decided to delete it or change it totally, other Wikipedians will "revert" your changes as "vandalism."
There's an easy workaround to this, though. If you make a large change (and, frankly, large changes *are* likely to be vandalism) and it gets reverted, just post to the talk page, explaining your credentials and highlighting the nature of the problems, then post your edits again, with a comment that the changes are legitimate and to p
Another thing (Score:5, Funny)
Wikipedia: 1
Britannica: 0
Re:Another thing (Score:5, Insightful)
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! (Score:5, Funny)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse [wikipedia.org]
Re:Hah! "Science" articles! (Score:3, Insightful)
More telling is what Britannica says about Wikipedia [britannica.com]:
Sorry, we were unable to find results for your search.
Researched??? (Score:3, Insightful)
"My latest wiki contributions include identifying the person who took the picture for goatse.cx."
Re:Hah! "Science" articles! (Score:3, Funny)
Did they fix them? (Score:3, Interesting)
Longer article... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Longer article... (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, so if the Brittanica has an article which says "Bill Clinton was the 41st President of the United States" and that's all, and Wikipedia has a 12-page entry on Clinton which gets his date-of-birth wrong by one day but is perfectly accurate everywhere else, that's okay?
Look at some of the articles listed. The Wiki article (on Robert Burns Woodward) has a detailed breakdown of his life, his career, discoveries, and Nobel pr
Get your facts info from more than one source (Score:4, Insightful)
Use Wikiagra - Increase Length and Girth! (Score:3, Insightful)
12 % of Nature authors consult Wikipedia weekly (Score:4, Insightful)
Wikipedia is better... (Score:2)
There is still one critical difference - (Score:2, Insightful)
Some Wikipedia entries are far more detailed and far more accurate than Britannica's - however, that doesn't change the fact that the content was written by unknown persons with unknown source material for their entries.
Since when? (Score:3, Insightful)
Since when does longer mean better? If anything, Britannica's conciseness could be the result of several revisions and reviews for impact per word. Encyclopedias are about bang for the buck -- you can't fit everything into an article. It's meant to be a starting point.
That's where Wikipedia is supposed to excel -- the amount of live links available to primary web sites in addition to bibliography.
Two questions (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, less than 3 errors/article compared to about 4 errors/article gives us more than 33% more errors/article Wikipedia. Many people (including Nature) are calling this close. Since when is 33% close? "Closer than expected," maybe but not close.
Can't reference Wikipedia because it changes (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Can't reference Wikipedia because it changes (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Can't reference Wikipedia because it changes (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Can't reference Wikipedia because it changes (Score:3, Informative)
For an example compare the entries on winemaking in the two. One encyclopedia explains how to make wine, the other merely defines it.
Wiki has it all.... (Score:4, Informative)
How are they quantifying "error"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How are they quantifying "error"? (Score:4, Informative)
Did ANYONE RTFA? (Score:3, Informative)
TFA (first paragraph on the page): 50 articles compared, and articles selected with very similar lengths, and some material removed (e.g. references) if necessary to make them same lengths.
Very nice. (Score:3, Funny)
what about now? (Score:3, Insightful)
Either way, I'd like to see a repeat of the same test. They listed the articles they reviewed. Im sure the wikipedia articles are full of "0" errors now.
Failure modes (Score:3, Interesting)
The nice thing about britannica is that though it is imperfect, I have seen few cases of pervasive campaigns of misinformation. To avaoid this failure mode, an editor should require a writier to be broad and reference a variety of sources. Also, when we are taught to use the encyclopedia, we are taught not to use a a primary source, but merely as a starting point. For instance, few say that the encyclopedia says this or that.
OTOH, the failure mode of wikipedia is potentially catastophic. The winners are often those who have the power to to push thier persepctive of a particular topic. This is not always the case, but since it is a probably failure mode, and since there does not appear to be an effective defense, it makes the wikipedia a much less reliable source of information, on average, than the britannica.
In the end I think the summary is another example of sloppy science. It is not so bad, as it indicates that the wiki can be more or less trusted on the types of topics nature posted, although the wiki did have more erros, though perhaps not statistically significant. The wikipedia process absolutely has to deal with the failure modes, and should encourage authors to point to peer reviewed sources to justify their claims of science and history, and a variety of sources for current events. After all, if everything comes from the weekly world news, we cannot expect much overall accuracy.
It shouldn't matter that much (Score:3, Interesting)
Participation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Participation (Score:3, Informative)
Part of the Problem (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
"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.
Encyclopedia Britannica is much worse. (Score:3, Interesting)
The Encyclopedia Britannica article [britannica.com] was not inaccurate. It was, however, extremely misleading. It was worse than worthless, since it gave the idea that Barbara McClintock's achievements were much less valuable and extensive than they actually are. After many years and much progress in Biology, her work is still valuable. A copy of her papers requires 80 feet of shelf space!
The Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] is far, far better than the one in the full Encyclopedia Britannica.
No space-limited, profit-oriented publication can compare to internet research, for most topics. I don't think that Encyclopedia Britannica has anything against Barbara McClintock, but the company must decide how much paper they want to buy.
Why just science articles? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Accuracy not an issue with non-controversial topic (Score:3, Insightful)
OTOH, when you get into topics that are controversial, most of the people who are driven to write about it feel passionately about the topic one way or another. In this way, objectivity flies out the window, and it is possible for inaccuracies to abound.
It is wrong to make blanket statements concerning Wikipedia's accuracy. Like information on the WWW in general, sometimes it is very accurate, sometimes it is not. Either way, you have to be amazed at how exhaustive it can be... something Britannica will never achieve.
In our current zeitgeist of moral relativism I am surprised that so many people are up in arms over the accuracy of Wikipedia articles.
But did they correct? (Score:3, Interesting)
At least I know how much to trust Wikipedia (Score:4, Insightful)
The biggest problem with an "authoritative source" like Britanica, is that people--especially students--are tempted to take it as a final authority. But Britanica is not infallible, and even when it is correct, it is often superficial. People are tempted to settle for predigested opinions instead of forming their own
I think that the vulnerability of Wikipedia is in some respects a good thing, because it inculcates good research habits. I don't take Wikipedia as a final authority on anything, because I know that any given article might have been edited by a crackpot or an ideologue. Quote Wikipedia as an authority in a debate, and people will laugh at you. But I find Wikipedia extremely useful as a starting point for research; I just confirm anything important from primary sources--something that you should be doing this even if you use Britanica.
Instantaneous Content (Score:3, Interesting)
Ony once had the new bleeding edge research not already been nicely integrated into the current article and sourced with a link to the academic paper or article.
"Rife with howling factual errors" (Score:3, Informative)
Among the errors is the origin of the OS that the servers ran, a System V variant called DG/UX. From the cited incorrect version [wikipedia.org] (22 July 2005):
And in the current version [wikipedia.org]:
Night and day. And there was more (quote from the Register letters article):
Re:Surely.. (Score:2)
Hey, it's accurate!