Nature: Wikipedia and Britannica accuracy compared
Hot on the heels of widespread criticism of Wikipedia’s authority, Nature conducted a comparison and found that the difference in accuracy between science articles in Britannica and Wikipedia is not that big. See the Nature article for details.
However, as noted in the Slashdot posting, some folks at Wikipedia found that the Wikipedia samples used by Nature were, on average, 2.5 times longer than the Britannica ones.
This is not the first comparison with similar results (here’s one from Freedom to Tinker) and there have been other examples of Britannica’s errors.
What I found particularly interesting was the knee-jerk reaction to Seigenthaler’s article, with people at many discussion boards declaring that “Wikipedia is Totally Inaccurate!!!” and therefore a useless reference source that only the most irresponsible person would touch. This is an extremely unfortunate view, and it doesn’t help that it has been echoed by many librarians.
For instance, as quick reference sources, Wikipedia and Answers.com are fantastic. Say you want some quick information on whales and even a quick list of species in the order cetacea with links to information on each species, nothing really compares to wikipedia’s combination of organization, ease of use and fairly detailed entries.