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16 Dec 2005
Online encyclopaedia Wikipedia is about as accurate on science as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a comparison study has found.
The British journal Nature ran blind tests asking experts to compare scientific entries from both publications.
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The reviewers were asked to check for errors, but were not told about the source of the information.
Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia.
Reviewers found 162 factual errors in the Wikipedia documents, compared to 123 in the Britannica documents.
Nature also said that its reviewers found that Wikipedia entries were often poorly structured and confused. Wikipedia is a free resource edited by 13,000 contributors.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica declined to comment on the findings.
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How To Improve Wikipedia
In the post I wrote about Nature's study, I mention that scientific accuracy would be more likely not to suffer from vandalism or inaccuracies because empirical research by definition can't be based on opinion. However, for historical, biographical, cultural (Re:, everything that can be disputed), Wikipedia's accuracy will always remain an issue. They need to emphasize external links, institute a vandalism warning system where readers can alert others to an article's inauthenticity (see my bicameral article rating system idea on Wikipedia if you're interested), and employ editors who can improve readability and grammatical correctness. -Jonathan http://philoneist.com
Posted by: Jonathan 16 Dec 2005