Wikipedia Corrects Encyclopedia Britannica

javipas writes "Despite all the controversy about Wikipedia's work model, no one can argue the potential of a project that has so effectively demonstrated the usefulness of the 'wisdom of crowds' concept. And that wisdom has detected a large number of mistakes in one of the most revered founts of human knowledge, the Encyclopedias Britannica. Among the wrong information collected on this page are the name at birth of Bill Clinton and the definition of the NP problems in mathematics."

Score +5 (Troll)

Too bad most of the administrators think they know more than you, simply because they read an article on the subject. The others are all to happy to demonstrate the Wikipedia caste system to you.

Re:Score +5 (Troll)

Concise but rich. You've really summarized the problem of Wikipedia, and all peer-dictated fora, quite elegantly.

Re:Score +5 (Troll)

Too bad most of the administrators think they know more than you, simply because they read an article on the subject. The others are all to happy to demonstrate the Wikipedia caste system to you.

[citation needed [wikipedia.org]]

Re:Score +5 (Troll)

There are times when I feel the urge to write "citation needed" on every single article on conservapedia, eg. on the origins of kangaroos:

"After the Flood, these kangaroos bred from the Ark passengers migrated to Australia." [citation needed]

I mean, what the fuck?

"There is debate whether this migration happened over land with lower sea levels during the post-flood ice age, or before the supercontinent of Pangea broke apart, or if they rafted on mats of vegetation torn up by the receding flood waters." [citation really fucking needed]

Kangaroos crossing thousands of miles of ocean on rafts.. I'm not sure these guys are strictly adhering to their anti-pot-smoking policy.

Re:Score +5 (Troll)

[citation needed]

[citation needed] [xkcd.com]

Are These Mistakes Or Intentional?

When my friends and I were younger, we were Trivial Pursuit fanatics, and one game, I was asked a science question (don't remember the exact question) but the answer listed was incorrect. I was so pissed that I actually wrote the manufacturers complaining, and I received a letter from them explaining that in some cases, incorrect answers and occasional misspellings were intentionally included to help combat copyright infringements. Should a competitor use the same questions and intentionally bogus answers, then proving infringement was easier.

OK, I understand that the Encyclopedia Britannica is meant to be an authoritative source, but is it possible that some inconsistencies or errors were introduced in a similar manner?

Britanicca is useless.

Even if it were error free, Britanicca would still be useless - it does not enough content.

I mean, where's the articles on Fanboy [wikipedia.org]? Or the List of minor Buffy the Vampire Slayer characters. [wikipedia.org] (and for that matter, detailed summaries [wikipedia.org] of individual episodes [wikipedia.org]) Or for that matter, where's the article on the Slashdot effect [wikipedia.org]

Re:Britanicca is useless.

Even if it were error free, Britanicca would still be useless - it does not enough content.

I mean, where's the articles on Fanboy? Or the List of minor Buffy the Vampire Slayer characters. (and for that matter, detailed summaries of individual episodes) Or for that matter, where's the article on the Slashdot effect

I'm glad something is documenting every minutae of our popular culture. Popular culture of the past is fascinating, and often tells you a lot more about what it was really like to live in the time than journalistic or encyclopedia articles or the works promoted to "high culture" of the period.

For example I love old newspaper strips from the turn of the century to the Great Depression. They're endlessly fascinating, ofen very well written and draw you into a world that is very similar yet completely different than our own. They're also incredibly difficult to find, even some of the ones that were enormously popular (like Buster Brown or Mutt and Jeff), and there is almost nil written about them. Someone else might find this in Old West dimestore novels, or minor Victorian theater, who knows. What I wouldn't give for the "fanboys" of the past to have documented every minutae, because there are a lot of great works have simply faded into obscurity because they were considered "throwaway pop culture" at the time.

That's the beauty of Wikipedia; it's limitless and only takes a small community (even of one) to decide something is relevant. If it's something you don't find interesting then there's no reason for you to bother with it. And who knows? In fifty years an article about Fanboyism, Buffy characters or the Slashdot effect may be extremely treasured information to someone else.

By the way how long did it take The Beatles or Charlie Chaplin to make it to Britannica's pages?

Re:Britanicca is useless.

But that's completely untrue, isn't it? Hundreds of articles are deleted from wikipedia every day because they're deemed by editors to be irrelevant or of interest to too few people.

Re:Britanicca is useless.

How do you digg comments on here? I see all these scores but no way to digg people up or down.

Re:Britanicca is useless.

I don't think the Wikipedia is that great for that sort of thing:
1) The admins delete a lot of stuff fairly arbitrarily and sometimes even for false reasons (to paraphrase: it only takes a very small community to delete stuff).
2) There does not appear to be an easily accessible history of deleted stuff.

And what are the odds that the wikipedia will last longer than paper from the 1900s?

Re:Britanicca is useless.

FYI, Britanicca is not a collection of popular culture or slang terms. It is an encyclopedia.

Re:

talk: I hate Britanicca. It's at best a well spoken gentleman in a pub. It sounds right but I can't be sure. Fixed that for you.

Re:Britanicca is useless.

talk: I hate Britannica. It's at best a well spoken gentleman in a pub. It sounds right but I can't be sure. Fixed that for you.

      Fixed that for you.

Re:Britanicca is useless.

Thanks! I spell like I love: Poorly and with great haste.

Re:

Wikipedia says it was Flavor Aid [wikipedia.org]

Re:

Don't forget the list of Afghani fish stamps.

Reference, please?

ok lets compare the number of wiki errors

why so silent now? Oh thats right Wiki is brimming with incorrect information.

Re:ok lets compare the number of wiki errors

I'm not much of a grammar nazi, but people who never heard of the shift key come off as 15 or less.

you're talking about e. e. cummings again, aren't you?

A novelty but nothing more.

This is the kind of thing that Wikipedians love to trot out to show how much better they think they are than traditional sources, but this "corrections" list is not actually very meaningful. Heck, I once caught a typo in The Economist - does that mean a publication I made would thus be more accurate and reliable than The Economist? No, it just means they messed up once. Hey, when you produce a large volume of text, it happens. The real question is, how often do they mess up compared to how often we mess up? And that is a difficult question to find the true answer to, but one thing is for sure: it's certainly not hard to find errors in Wikipedia.

Re:A novelty but nothing more.

For what it's worth, I seem to recall, a year or two ago, this page having a note at the beginning about how it's not really all that serious of a page, more of a few quick jabs back at Britannica. I'm really very disappointed that it's being posted here with such trumped-up language in the summary.

Re:A novelty but nothing more.

This page catalogs some mistakes and omissions in Encyclopædia Britannica (EB) and shows how they have been corrected in Wikipedia. Some errors have already been corrected in Britannica's online version. For many reasons, this page should not be taken too seriously as a comparison; it's just a little bit of fun. It does not mean one is better than the other.

I'd say RTFA but for all I know when you looked at the page it could have said something completely different.

Re:A novelty but nothing more.

I think that's the whole point - not that Wikipedia contains fewer errors than Britannica (the idea you're debunking), but that finding an error here or there in something doesn't prove anything, much less negate the value of the whole collection. It's simply to blunt accusations against Wikipedia, not bring down Britannica.

However, to me and most people Wikipedia really is far more valuable than Britannica - simply because we have no access to Britannica. And I also think the vast majority of wikipedia pages are quite good - at least the ones anybody is interested in. Certainly a much higher S/N ratio than the Internet at large. I even have a downloaded copy of wikipedia on my PocketPC, it's amazing how rarely I can not settle issues or questions that arise by consulting it.

For every good example...

For every good example, there apparently are several bad examples [wikipedia.org] of this so called "wisdom of crowds." I'm not saying it doesn't work, but to pretend that it's the be all and end all of systems is just disingenuous.

Wisdom of crowds is a pretty good concept, but in reality it turns out that the crowds aren't always so wise.

Wikiality bites

Wikiality bites [photobucket.com].

So says Stephen Colbert.

Britannica should also check its facts about elephant populations. I heard it has tripled.

Purposeful

How many of those errors were purposefully introduced? Encyclopedias and map makers do that all the time to see if others are plagerizing.

Re:Purposeful

How many of those errors were purposefully introduced? Encyclopedias and map makers do that all the time to see if others are plagerizing.

    I love irony.

Re:Purposeful

If an encyclopedia purposefully says something incorrect, it has lost credibility for a poor reason. For example, if I want to know what the NP problem is, I don't consider it acceptable that an encyclopedia purposefully lied to me just to mess with its competitors.

It's not the crowd, it's the 3-4 people...

Wikipedia's problem has rarely been with the articles that get widespread review. The problem is with obscure knowledge; pages where only a handful of people maintain them. I wish I could find the op-ed piece I read a year or two ago about how a Florida group was using their Wikipedia entry to disseminate a view supporting their claim to being recognized as a tribe...so they could build a casino. I remember something about numerous statements being wrong, and the only people who would knew it was wrong (other people from that ethnic group who knew the oral history) were unlikely to surf wikipedia, much less correct it, or stick through an 'edit war'.

This doesn't sound like a big deal, until you realize that it's the fringe stuff that can be consulted the most by adults, particularly those who consider themselves well educated.

How many big fish in little ponds have axes to grind? More than most of us suspect, I'm guessing.

On the other hand...

That obscure stuff often isn't in Britannica at all. And a lot of the articles about obscure stuff in Wikipedia are fine. I think the only sensible conclusion to draw from this and every other comparison that has been made between the two is that Wikipedia and Britannica each have their strengths and weaknesses, and neither one is indisputably better than the other. They're different. Wikipedia is most useful when you treat it as a source for references, rather than blindly trusting the words on the page. Of course, that kind of goes against human nature, but what can you do? :) ~~~~

Slashdot citation

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This article has been tagged since July 2007.

Among the wrong information collected on this page are the name at birth of Bill Clinton and the definition of the NP problems in mathematics."

Seriously though, if you're interested in the details behind this comment, see the article about it in wikipedia [wikipedia.org].

Re:Slashdot citation

Obligatory xkcd. [xkcd.com]

Old news, please disregard

This page has existed nearly since the beginning of Wikipedia. For a long long time it contained a disclaimer that it was just for the fun of it, and not to be taken too seriously. I think the disclaimer was taken off because it should be inherently obvious. Well apparently not to the submitter, who submitted what amounts to a flame bait story. Oh well, such is slashdot. Gotta get pageviews I suppose. But the submitter should have known better than to trump it up so much in the submission.

The most convenient solution wins

One of the reasons people reference Wikipedia a lot, and one of the reasons it is so popular, is that it has a very high page rank on google and other search engines. People are lazy, and whatever information pops up first after typing something into google will be what is clicked on, and of course referenced. Wikipedia is clicked on more so than other sources simply because Wikipedia has a higher page rank and is more conveniently available.

Since wikipedia creates a community for users, it means people will link in to wikipedia more than any other encyclopedia (communities create links.. and links create higher page ranks).

If some other encyclopedia wants to be king, then they have to increase their page rank. The other encyclopedias will have to create communities and create reasons for people to link to them, in order for them to increase their popularity on google.

Since people usually choose the most convenient option, and since wikipedia is the most convenient option available on google for our mice to clicky dicky, the convenient option will win. It's not the fittest or the strongest that survive, but rather the most convenient solutions [z505.com] that survive.

Not a reliable source

Ever since I was in middle school I was told that the encyclopedia was merely a starting point and not a reliable source. The nice thing about the Britannica was that it laid out a formal representation of what was known at the time it was written. Although it did not exactly cross our mind that it was wrong, we knew that it was not to be used as a basis of fact. Starting in the 80's, with the less formal style, I think it has become even less useful. This is also the problem with wikipedia. It is useful for pop culture, and some pop technical stuff, but I still go to mathworld when I want to know math, and britannica when I want to know history.

The Encyclopedia Britannica has often been junk.

The Slashdot story says, "... one of the most revered founts of human knowledge, the Encyclopedias Britannica."

That's not true in my experience. In my experience, Encyclopedia Britannica salesmen used high-pressure tactics to sell encyclopedias to poor, uneducated people by telling them that their children needed an encyclopedia to become educated. Educated people knew it was better to go to the library.

EB has always been full of inadequate articles that were inadequate because the EB wanted to seem comprehensive, so it had a lot of articles, but didn't want to use a lot of expensive paper, so there was never enough space.

A good example was the EB article on Barbara McClintock [wikipedia.org], 1983 Nobel Laureate in Medicine for her amazing, pioneering work in genetics. Quote from Wikipedia: "In 1930, McClintock was the first person to describe the cross-shaped interaction of homologous chromosomes during meiosis. During 1931, McClintock and a graduate student, Harriet Creighton, proved the link between chromosomal crossover during meiosis and the recombination of genetic traits."

Why did it take 53 years for Barbara McClintock to win her Nobel Prize? Because other scientists had difficulty believing that genetic elements could jump from chromosome to chromosome.

I haven't looked at an EB article in the paper edition in many years, but at one time the EB article about Barbara McClintock was short, maybe 600 words, and gave no idea of the fact that her scientific papers are so extensive they require 40 feet or more of shelf space.

The EB article about Barbara McClintock was subtly misleading in other ways, also.

From the Wikipedia article: "The importance of McClintock's contributions only came to light in the 1960s, when the work of French geneticists Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod described the genetic regulation of the lac operon, a concept she had demonstrated with Ac/Ds in 1951."

Apparently because the controlling purpose of the EB has been to reduce amount of paper required, and apparently because the EB has always been more about creating a way for salesmen to be intimidating than about excellence, a lot of the EB articles have been worse than useless, because they are misleading.

The EB has been a vicious business run for profit, in my opinion. The articles have always been lacking in excellence, because excellence would have cost more.

Pre-Wiki EB Corrections

EB was being corrected by others long before Wiki existed. A 9 year old corrected their statement that Mercury was the hottest planet. He correctly notified them that Venus was.

Wiki is now operating at the level of a 9 year old.

OTOH, perhaps Wiki will have an article on how often /. posts are wrong.

Yes, but...

I doubt Britannica's editor's let them accidentally kill people (rhetorically, at least). Wikipedia is probably more accurate for large, visible topics but equally (if not more so?) subject to painful bias on obscure subjects.

Conservapedia points out Wikipedia's bias

In reaction to the Wikipedia page pointing out EB's errors, Conservapedia has
put up a link in their "Breaking News" section to their page listing examples
of Wikipedia's strongly liberal bias (you did know that, didn't you? Wikipedia
is SIX TIMES MORE LIBERAL THAN AMERICA! (as reported by Wikipedia on their
page about Conservapedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservapedia [wikipedia.org] )).

As of 11PM PST, July 23rd, Conservapedia has a link to the bias page at the top of
their "Breaking News" section on their home page. But here's the direct link:
http://www.conservapedia.com/Bias_in_Wikipedia [conservapedia.com]

A few choice examples:
A devastating critique of Wikipedia by Fox News describes the impact of Wikipedia smears on popular golfer Fuzzy Zoeller.
Wikipedia is sympathetic to Fidel Castro in its entry about Cuba.
Wikipedia's entry for the Renaissance denies any credit to Christianity, its primary inspiration.
Plus 63 more! Enjoy.

Wikipedia is getting better

There are a few minor issues I have with the new winds blowing over at Wikipedia, but these are not pressing enough for me to get all worked up over them.

Over all I'm positively surprised at Wikipedia's ability to continually get better, work on not only the content but also the form factor.

A greater emphasis on references and citations has greatly contributed to some articles.

There are a few problems, such as the fact that important and well known scientists are still reluctant to contribute.

Overall though, Wikipedia is continually evolving and getting better, which is a whole lot more than can be said about Britannica or any other encyclopedia which have pretty much kept to their centuries old methods ideas.

Pros and Cons

The one think WP gets right is the online access. Freed of the need to limit paper use or even disc space (and therefore cost), an online encyclopedia can afford to expand on any topic for as far as that topic needs. WP gets everything else wrong: there's no business model, no quality control except agreeing with the consensus, no overall editing system either for the entire work or individual articles, a deranged approach to point-of-view, and - ironically - no good mechanism for keeping the length of trivial articles under control.

TWW

And so the errors of the Encyclopedia Britannica

will be corrected in the next edition. So the Encyclopedia Britannica even gets some 'wisdom of crowds' in addtion to their own editors. The best of two worlds, and it would not have been possible without Wikipedia. Hurray for competition, hurray for Britannica, hurray for Wikipedia.

I bet that Wikipedia editors sectetly read the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Re:Errors

All of them.

Re:Errors

A great many, the problem with the "wisdom of the mob" theory is exactly that- the mob. Information unfavorable to cultural biases will be left out of the encylopedia - take the article on circumcision and the article on penis - there are a few fanatics (including an administrator and a member of arbcom) who use the rules to bludgeon people to keep information (that is clearly verifiable [read: medical studies]) out of those articles (and related ones) because it casts circumcision in an unfavorable light (and appropriately so - it's no more medically appropriate 99.9999999% of the time than female genital mutilation). The bias is subtle, one of withholding information, and the people enforcing the bias are very good at making it look like they're in the right - all because of the idea that "the wisdom of the mob" is infallible. there are definantly other articles that this is true about as well.

Wisdom of the Mob fails when Fact contradicts Culture.

Re:Errors

Yep. A similar problem occurred with me when I tried to edit the Christopher Columbus page. Try including quotes from his journal that show he intended to forcibly enslave the native Arawaks, or attempt to write about what Columbus did when he first met them, and it just gets deleted. Instead, the article tries to show him as some well-meaning Christian who found gold in rivers, or politely asked where he could find it. When I queried this many times on the talk page, the response I got was along the lines of, "Yes, we know he enslaved them, and we know he went after gold, but let's not get too caught up on these aspects, because Columbus wasn't unique in doing this." So you have an article where the word slave is mentioned once, and there is not one statement regarding the actions that Columbus and his men undertook to use the Arawaks as slaves to find gold.

I used to love Wikipedia, but that incident made me realise it's nothing more than a starting point to get a very basic idea of a subject and then move on.

Re:Errors

"I used to love Wikipedia, but that incident made me realise it's nothing more than a starting point to get a very basic idea of a subject and then move on"

Seriously, it took you a problem with editors to figure that out? I would have expected anyone on Slashdot to recognize that immediately.

Am I too old or something? Are all "those damn kids" being taught that Wikipedia is now an acceptable source to quote without verification?

Wisdom of experts is no better

The Britannica article has nothing negative to say about circumcision either:

http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9082690/circu mcision [britannica.com]

Re:Errors

I see you know absolutely nothing about anatomy. The foreskin is the same structure as the clitoral hood. Removal of the clitoral hood, a form of female genital mutilation, is the direct female equivalent of removal of the foreskin. The foreskin contains 66% of the erogenous nerves of the penis, 50% of the mobile tissue (without that it is MUCH more likely for the female to get sore during intercourse). Only your ignorance makes it seem to be an obscene error in magnitude (that is to not say there aren't forms of FGM that are worse than the one mentioned, but that doesn't make circumcision not evil).

You know why people compaign against it? Because it was done on us when we were infants, without our consent or any ability to reverse the damage done. It is the ONLY cosmetic medical proceedure allowed to be performed on a child with a parents preference.

Even a small amount of HONEST research will reveal that circumcision is an evil practice.

It was started in the english speaking world as a cure to masturbation - because at the time (late 1800s) masturbation was considered the root of all evil. Dr Kellogg and a few others got everyone to start cutting off foreskins - Dr Kellogg also encouraged applying carbonic acid to the clitoris for the same reasons. Infact FGM was practiced in the united states within living history - see the book "The Rape of Innocence" by Patricia Robinett - a woman born in kansas in the 50s who had most of her labia and her clitoris removed.

So before you godwin the thread again, know what the fuck you're talking about.

Re:Willy

his name is Robert Paulson

It's a repeat of "bloggers are journalists"

Sure Wikipedia might have some materials that is more correct than EB, and likely the reverse holds true too. Good research takes more than just having arbitrary contributions from a wide audience.