WIKIPEDIA ARTICLES NOT ALWAYS ACCURATE
By: Ben Casey
The Rebel Yell
Issue: 04/17/2006
Section: Opinion
Leo Szilard once said, “Even if we accept as the basic tenet of true
democracy that one moron is equal to one genius, is it necessary to
go a further step and hold that two morons are better than one genius?”
Wikipedia has received a great deal of press lately. For those of
you who don’t know what it is, Wikipedia is an online collaborative
encyclopedia that is free for anyone to edit. The basic problem with
this concept is well documented, and you are bound to find an error
of assertion or omission on its Web site somewhere. But it’s fairly
self-correcting because of its size, and no repository of knowledge
can claim perfection. In fact, in December 2005 Nature, one of
the foremost publications in the sciences, published a news story
declaring that Wikipedia was “about as inaccurate” as Encyclopedia
Britannica. Britannica is the most trusted publication in the English
language. The rivalry between Britannica and Wikipedia is something
worth noting.
Wikipedia compares itself to Britannica at every opportunity, harping
at great length on any inaccuracies or omissions found in the latter,
posing them as rivals and making a great to-do of their own theoretical
superiority. Wikipedia’s most ardent supporters have always believed
that it will inevitably replace elite publications like Britannica,
and some will go to any lengths to prove it. The rivalry is, generally,
one-way. Britannica recognizes the ambitions of Wikipedia, but does
not generally respond. When the Nature study came out, critics of
Wikipedia noticed its slant almost immediately.
For one, “about as inaccurate” apparently meant that Wikipedia had
been judged a third more inaccurate than Britannica. Apparently, the
experiment focused on the sciences, wherein Wikipedia is generally
less inaccurate; and minor inaccuracies or omissions were treated as
equal to major ones.
Then came the Britannica response (which can be found in full at
re_response.pdf). It
is a truly remarkable document which amounts to a 20 page breakdown
of a major science publication by the English language’s most
trusted encyclopedia. As a science enthusiast, I found it literally
awe-inspiring. Within their response, Britannica rebuts nearly half
of the criticisms made about its articles with everything from humble
admissions to withering scorn. It questions the Nature study’s biased
methodology; most importantly, it reveals that several reviews were not
even of Encyclopedia Britannica articles at all – some came from the
Book of the Year, and others were hodgepodges from various sources. In
one case, a reviewer referred to material not part of any Britannica
publication. The verdict was fairly clear: the Nature study – conducted
by Nature and its editors, not a third party – was almost entirely
without merit. Even in a study dramatically biased in Wikipedia’s
favor, the difference in inaccuracy was astounding. And yet, the
story was spun as a triumph for the collaborative encyclopedia.
The ideological reasons why the Nature editors might have felt it
incumbent to publish a biased and misleading study on the merits
of Wikipedia are many, but no good cause justifies doctoring the
evidence. Sadly, the passions of Nature’s editors apparently got
away with them, leading them to tarnish the reputation of one of
the scientific community’s most prestigious publications to the
benefit of a Web site which has already become extremely well known
in its field. The errors found in Wikipedia are dramatic because the
“free for anyone to edit” policy allows anyone to come in and say,
for instance, that the Armenian genocide was actually a civil war.
Information from Wikipedia needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
There’s no reason it should replace the scholarly, well-edited and
traditional encyclopedia – exemplified by Britannica – which will
always be a consistent and accurate resource to check the facts
presented by the wild and potentially hazardous collaborative
intelligence of Wikipedia.