[WikiEN-l] Re: BBC News Online Story.

Thu Dec 15 16:28:45 UTC 2005

Yes, this makes it rather hard to design a good blinded study. 
Feeding all text through a dialect-simulator, or better yet an editor
that unifies paragraph-length and word choice without altering any
facts or much clarity, might help.  The design of a decent
reference-work comparison study might merit a paper in itself.

SJ

On 12/15/05, slimvirgin at gmail.com <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/15/05, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > ... apparently the checkers weren't even told that what
> > they were checking came from Wikipedia so as to avoid bias :-)
>
> I'm afraid it would have been obvious from the writing which articles
> were from Wikipedia. The EB is able to provide the facade of accuracy
> because the writing is so smooth, so you don't expect to find factual
> errors. In Wikipedia articles, you do, because the writing is often
> very poor, so the other problems tend to jump off the page.
>
> Sarah
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--
++SJ