The New York Times weighs in
Source : RecentChanges.info - all things .wiki
NY Times writer George Johnson weighs in on the debate over Wikipedia’s accuracy with a balanced article which actually does some numerical analysis of the accuracy of Wikipedia vs. Britannica. He reports that “A study last month in Nature showed that the decision is far from clear-cut. Calling on experts to compare 42 competing entries, the journal counted an average of four errors per article in Wikipedia - and three in Britannica.” That is not terribly different, but how did they even compute such a number? The article goes on to describe some of the inaccuracies found in both resources and from that description I can only conclude that it’s pretty hard to really measure accuracy, but suffice to say that this should dispell the notion that the Britannica is way more accurate than Wikipedia.
The best part of the article comes at the end, where Johnson talks about the benefits of having many people of less expertise eventually create a better product than a smaller number of experts. He makes a masterful comparison of Darwin and Marx in making this point. His overall take — “Wikipedia is bound to catch up“.
Ray
le 04.01.06 à 10:25
dans News / Actualités
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