Comments on: Wikipedia vs. Britannica

By: Anonymoose

Anonymoose — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 21:47:14 +0000

I love wikipedia, even when it's wrong. Check out this joint wikipedia/google search thingy I made for a home page.

By: Greg Lastowka

Greg Lastowka — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 16:11:51 +0000

I was reading Orin’s comments about the Wikipedia entry on the Patriot Act, comaparing it to the above, and wondering: does Britannica have an entry on the Patriot Act? If so, what would Orin think of it?

By: asdf

asdf — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 08:48:55 +0000

Case in point: the wikipedia article for “quark”, mentioned in the comparison to EB, has a recent edit correcting every occurrence of “hardon” to “hadron”, and an edit just before that making the opposite change. If an EB article on quarks had misspelled “hadron” as “hardon” it would have taken *years* for a correction to make its way into the print edition. Score one for wikipedia.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 07:05:26 +0000

Interesting result. But there’s more to an encyclopedia than accuracy. Completeness, for one thing. Also a certain level of consistency. My guess is Wikipedia lags behind in those things. The Nature article notes:

“Several Nature reviewers agreed with Panelas’ point on readability, commenting that the Wikipedia article they reviewed was poorly structured and confusing. This criticism is common among information scientists, who also point to other problems with article quality, such as undue prominence given to controversial scientific theories. But Michael Twidale, an information scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says that Wikipedia’s strongest suit is the speed at which it can updated, a factor not considered by Nature’s reviewers.”