[Foundation-l] Corrected results from Nature article

Thu Dec 15 07:09:05 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: 1.4; Britannica: 3.6.

Put another way:  Wikipedia has 4 errors to their 3; our articles were 
also 2 1/2 times longer on average.

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.

brian0918