[Foundation-l] Closer look at Nature's results: Average article size for Wikipedia: 6.80 KB; Britannica: 2.60 KB. Number of errors per 2KB for Wikipedia: 1; Britannica: 6.5

Thu Dec 15 08:29:25 UTC 2005

That's just great information.

What would be interesting also would be to draw a social map of articles 
in WP and EB, in order to see if they take care of the same topics or 
concentrate on different things.

Brian wrote:
> Nature has a special report at 
> http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html ,  detailing 
> the results of an accuracy comparison between WP and EB. While the 
> Wikipedia articles often contained more inaccuracies than Britannica's, 
> they don't look at the article sizes in each case. With Maveric149's 
> help, I did:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28news%29#Nature_follow-up:__How_do_the_article_sizes_compare.3F 
> 
> 
> Result: Average article size for Wikipedia: 6.80 KB; Britannica: 2.60 
> KB. Number of errors per 2KB for Wikipedia: 1; Britannica: 6.
> 
> Put another way:  Wikipedia has 4 errors to their 3; our articles were 
> also 2 1/2 times longer on average.
> 
> 
> Can someone please check my math, I did this pretty fast, and was half 
> asleep :)  It's not 100% accurate, but I was only going for a ballpark 
> estimate.  Note: we copied the displayed WP text, not the edit box text, 
> and removed the TOC, See also, references, external links, and any other 
> big tables or lists. The WP text came from just before the Nature 
> article was published.
> 
> Raul654 and I separately submitted stories to Slashdot, and I would 
> suggest anyone willing do something similar. The more requests they have 
> for this, the more likely they are to accept it.
> 
> brian0918
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