ajg: If The Register is right, Nature Magazine has some splain’n to do.
Back in December, Nature published the results of an investigation, conducted by them, comparing the accuracy of Encyclopedia Britannica to Wikipedia. The shocking results showed that Britannica was only slightly more accurate than Wikipedia, an online, user-edited encyclopedia, whose own co-founder says contains articles that are “horrific crap.”
The press jumped on the story, assuming it to be unbiased and scientific. Since then, the world has waited.
Now Britannica is responding, accusing Nature of ginning-up their results. In a scathing comeback, Britannica states the study was misleading and notes that its conclusions were “completely without merit”, challenging Nature to disavow the report.
Why would Nature put itself out on a limb and risk its reputation?
Who knows. Maybe they were just trying to prove that old “monkey at a typewriter” theory.
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March 24th, 2006 at 7:23 am
Arwel
Where Wikipedia is concerned, The Register - and Andrew Orlowski in particular - is not particularly rational. Nature’s reaction to Britannica’s screed can be found at http://www.nature.com/press_releases/Britannica_response.pdf - which basically ends with “we do not intend to retract our article”.
Reading Britannica’s “refutation”, I’m amazed that their gripe in many of the comparisons is that a Wikipedia article was compared against an article from their Year Book, rather than the EB proper; I’m sure that it will come as a surprise to many readers of Encyclopaedia Britannica that they don’t regard the Year Book as as authoritative as the main encyclopaedia… and this puts them at even more of a disadvantage against Wikipedia when it comes to timeliness of information.