The Encyclopedia Brittanica has expressed its extreme displeasure with the Nature science journal over its comparison of Britannica to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is just as good as Brittanica, so the story goes. At minimum, Nature had described Wikipedia content as "no more unreliable" than that in the venerable Brittanica. Now it has been Nature reported that of the 50 articles it sent to independent experts, Brittanica's had 123 errors to Wikipedia's 162. Some of the errors were differences of opinion instead of mistakes, Brittanica also claimed: "Dozens of the so-called inaccuracies they attributed to us were nothing of the kind; they were the result of reviewers expressing opinions that differed from ours about what should be included in an encyclopedia article. In these cases Britannica's coverage was actually sound." Nature's choice to run the article without noting how it differed in preparation from the academic work it usually presents probably has caused the most problems. RoughType blogger Nicholas Carr Ultimately, Carr observed just how Wikipedia could be a much better source of information, if it followed the open source model more rigorously: The open source model is not a democratic model. It is the combination of community and hierarchy that makes it work. Community without hierarchy means mediocrity. | document.write("Email Murdok here.") Add to document.write("Del.icio.us") | Yahoo! My Web Drag this to your Bookmarks. David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
Problems Sprout For Nature Over Wikipedia
0 views
Comments (0)
Please sign in to leave a comment.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!