[WikiEN-l] New York Times article on WP v. EB

Tue Jan 3 21:44:46 UTC 2006

Lest anyone think WP only gets bad press, there was a nice article in
the New York Times this morning on the front of the Science section
about the WP v. EB comparison. Among other things, it features the
fact that the prestigious reviewer of one of our articles had a
similar error to the one criticized WP for in his own book on the
subject (when asked about this, he notes that it must be a
typographical error -- that's gotta sting!), and notes that "many of
the purported blunders seem open to debate."

At times the author seems downright explicitly against the model of
EB: "The idea that perfection can be achieved solely through
deliberate effort and centralized control has been given the lie in
biology with the success of Darwin and in economics with the failure
of Marx."

The author notes that even though one can write really silly things on
WP articles, they generally get cleaned up pretty quickly.

He ends on a pretty positive note: "Whatever their shortcomings,
neither encyclopedia appears to be as error-prone as one might have
inferred from Nature, and if Britannica has an edge in accuracy,
Wikipedia seems bound to catch up."

Check it out:
George Johnson, "The Nitpicking of the Masses vs. the Authority of the
Experts" ''New York Times'' (January 3, 2006).
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/03/science/03comm.html

FF