[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 18:14:39 UTC 2005

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.

True as this may be, there is no need for a campaign of spin doctoring.

I think that the "Nature" article was largely sympathetic.  Our best 
response would be to review the articles surveyed to make whatever 
corrections are needed, or even to make corrections that they failed to 
notice as well.  Once this is done it could be brought to the attention 
of the "Nature" staff and a challenge issued to see how long it takes EB 
to make its corrections. 8-)

Ec