expected. While Jimmy Wales, the co-founder and promoter of Wikipedia, expressed delight, he also added: "Our goal is to get to Britannica quality or better".
In a rebuttal published in 2006, Encyclopaedia Britannica refuted Nature's findings, stating: 'Almost everything about the journal's investigation, from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading'[1]. The rebuttal stated that the conclusion of Nature's report was false, because the journal's research was invalid and clearly stated that the purpose of its production was to 'reassure Britannica's readers about the quality of our (Britannica's) content, and to urge that Nature issue a full and public retraction of the article'[1]. The document highlighted a number of concerns about Nature's research methodology[1] including:
- The lack of availability of the reviewers' reports.
- The selection of Britannica articles in an unstandardised manner from productions of the encyclopaedia (such as Britannica Student Encyclopaedia and Britannica Book of the Year) rather than solely from Encyclopaedia Britannica.
- The selection of only parts and sections of Britannica articles rather than entire entries.
- Rearrangement and re-editing of Britannica articles for the purpose of the study, including the merging of passages from two separate articles.
- Failure to clarify the factual assertions of the reviewers.
- Lack of distinction between minor inaccuracies and major errors.
- Clarification that the reviewers' comments were based on facts and not opinions.
- Misinterpretation and misleading presentation of the results.
Nature responded by rejecting Encyclopaedia Britannica's criticisms, affirming its confidence in the study, and refusing to retract[2]. Numerous other non-academic and academic publications have followed Nature's example, yielding interesting results. In 2007, a study by Stern magazine[3], compared 50 articles from the German Wikipedia to Brockhaus Enzyklopädie[4], the largest German language printed Encyclopaedia in the 21st century. Fifty articles from disciplines spanning politics, business, sports, entertainment, geography, science, medicine, history, culture and religion were rated by experts for accuracy, completeness, timeliness and clarity. Wikipedia achieved a mean overall score of 1.7 across disciplines on a scale from 1 (best) to 6 (worst), while entries for the same keywords from the paid online edition of the 15-volume Brockhaus achieved an average overall score of 2.7. Wikipedia articles scored higher on timeliness and accuracy than articles from Brockhaus Enzyklopädie, although the Wikipedia articles were judged too complicated for a lay audience.
The accuracy of Wikipedia entries in the sciences has been scrutinised. In a study published in the Annals of Pharmacotheraphy in 2008, Clauson and colleagues found the scope, completeness and accuracy of drug information in Wikipedia to be statistically lower than
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (March 2006), Fatally flawed: refuting the recent study on encyclopaedic accuracy by the journal Nature, [Online], Available at: http://corporate.britannica.com/britannica_nature_response.pdf [Accessed 11/03/11].
- ↑ Nature (23 March 2006), Encyclopaedia Britannica and Nature: a response, [Online], Available at http://www.nature.com/press_releases/Britannica_response.pdf [Accessed 11/03/11].
- ↑ http://www.stern.de/digital/online/stern-test-wikipedia-schlaegt-brockhaus-604423.html
- ↑ http://www.brockhaus.de/enzyklopaedie/30baende/index.php
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