Times Online Britannica 'still rules' over web rival

"A WAR of words has erupted over a study claiming that the Encyclopaedia Britannica is only marginally better than its upstart internet challenger, Wikipedia.

The venerable Britannica, founded in Edinburgh in 1768, is demanding that the scientific journal Nature publicly retract its finding that the open-source Wikipedia “comes close” to Britannica in accuracy."

"But Nature stuck to its guns, and fired back: “We reject those accusations, and are confident our comparison was fair.” The row goes to the heart of the role of experts in the internet age."

redux [12.15.05]
Nature Internet encyclopaedias go head to head

"One of the extraordinary stories of the Internet age is that of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. This radical and rapidly growing publication, which includes close to 4 million entries, is now a much-used resource. But it is also controversial: if anyone can edit entries, how do users know if Wikipedia is as accurate as established sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica?

Several recent cases have highlighted the potential problems."

"However, an expert-led investigation carried out by Nature — the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica's coverage of science — suggests that such high-profile examples are the exception rather than the rule.

The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three."

redux [12.06.05]
The Seattle Times False claim has Wikipedia revising article-creation rules

"Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute, is tightening submission rules after a prominent journalist complained that an article falsely implicated him in the Kennedy assassinations."

"Wikipedia, often cited as a prime example of the type of collective knowledge-pooling that the Internet enables, has about 850,000 articles in English, as well as entries in at least eight other languages."

The New York Times Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar
[requires 'free' registration]

"t has, by most measures, been a spectacular success. Wikipedia is now the biggest encyclopedia in the history of the world. As of Friday, it was receiving 2.5 billion page views a month, and offering at least 1,000 articles in 82 languages. The number of articles, already close to two million, is growing by 7 percent a month. And Mr. Wales said that traffic doubles every four months.

Still, the question of Wikipedia, as of so much of what you find online, is: Can you trust it?"

News.Com Wikipedia and the nature of truth

"For younger people, this is all second nature. Increasingly they rely--maybe exaggeratedly so--on the Internet for information. Purists may sniff at the elevation of Wikipedia to the rank of serious reference source. But that's what it has become for millions of people around the world.

On your ride home today, try pondering a future where Wikipedia's model of competing versions of the truth becomes the norm. Will the increasing influence of the wisdom of the crowd force us to rethink the nature of knowledge? With the proliferation of the Internet, more voices inevitably will become part of that conversation.

You can argue that epistemological revisionism goes on all the time."