[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 06:17:32 UTC 2005

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