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.
More words == lower error rate? (Score:3, Insightful)
Careful with stats... (Score:5, Insightful)
Versatility (Score:5, Insightful)
Game, set, match!
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.
Informative (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking of poor writing.... (Score:2, Insightful)
This confused me, until I realized that single-sentence paragraphs 2 and 3 should be a compound sentence.
Re:More words == lower error rate? (Score:3, Insightful)
Longer article... (Score:5, Insightful)
Get your facts info from more than one source (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Use Wikiagra - Increase Length and Girth! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nature editorial asks scientists to contribute (Score:2, Insightful)
12 % of Nature authors consult Wikipedia weekly (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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 declare their love for one another.
Yeah yeah its funny and you can lie and Ad Hom away but this is what people see. No matter how much
Other Encyclopedias don't have problems, anywhere even remotely close to Wiki with its slander and information athentication WARS.
I know, on dense heads and deaf ears. Wasting my time..
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: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.
Can't reference Wikipedia because it changes (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Careful with stats... (Score:2, Insightful)
The Nature of the Errors count. (Score:2, 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 prize. The Wiki article's section on his honors and awards - which is just a list - is longer than the entire Britannica article!
How are they quantifying "error"? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
I challenge an assumption (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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: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: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.
Participation (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not exactly (Score:4, Insightful)
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: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.
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.
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.
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.
Re:Dooop (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I challenge an assumption (Score:2, Insightful)
Back to what you said though, since more credentialed != better, you end up with an interesting situation with a "real" encyclopedia. You have experts that write on a topic, and they pass that on to a copyeditor who may or may not be an expert in the field. Her job is to make the article more efficient; she is the "better" writer you are talking about. Unfortunately, even the best editors make mistakes. (IANA encyclopedia author/editor, so anybody with more info please correct me.) Now with Wikipedia, you often end up with the opposite, where a non expert will get the stub started, and self-declared experts later fill in the blanks. So my guess is that even though the number of errors is comparable, they get introduced to the articles in different manners.
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 the result of new data not being incorporated fast enough into the books? Or are the Wiki errors pointless political tangents, while the EB errors tend towards not always crediting everyone involved in a discovery. Just saying "errors" doesn't really give a good enough analysis, but it's interesting nonetheless.
Re:Not exactly (Score:2, Insightful)
Note also that science is one of the few disciplines in which, by and large, there tends only to be one current scientific theory which is clearly stated and can easily be summarised encyclopedically. It is much, much, much easier to write a good article on the quark than on Hamlet.
And as you'd expect, Wikipedia's article on Hamlet is not very good. On the positive side, I can actually read it - unlike the Britannica article, which it seems you have to pay for. (They did let me read the first paragraph; it starts by presenting a contested theory as though it were an undisputable fact, an unimpressive opening that does not encourage me to part with $69.95 to see the rest.)
Researched??? (Score:3, Insightful)
"My latest wiki contributions include identifying the person who took the picture for goatse.cx."
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: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: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:2, Insightful)
For two hundred and thirty-five years, the Britannica's target audience had been well-educated readers with interests outside their immediate experience or profession. The encyclopedia has never claimed to meet the needs of a surgeon, a lawyer, or an engineer in his own specialty.
Re:Why just science articles? (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not exactly (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not exactly (Score:4, Insightful)