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Study: Online Wikipedia About as Accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica

Authored by dmw on December 17, 2005 - 6:58am.
London - Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that has come under fire recently for inaccuracies and submission guidelines, is about as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica, according to the findings of a study conducted by the scientific journal Nature. Founded in 2001, Wikipedia now features nearly 4 million entries, all of which are submitted by its users and may be edited by anyone online. Nature's sampling of 42 articles from both reference sources were examined by experts, who found that Wikipedia's science-related entries featured an average of four errors, while Britannica's had an average of three. "I'm pleased," Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told Nature. "Our goal is to get to Britannica quality, or better." The survey found eight "serious" errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts -- four from each source. "People will find it shocking to see how many errors there are in Britannica," Michael Twidale, an information scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told Nature. "Print encyclopaedias are often set up as the gold standards of information quality against which the failings of faster or cheaper resources can be compared. These findings remind us that we have an 18-carat standard, not a 24-carat one."