Wikipedia vs Encyclopaedia Britannica

In a very small scale and back-of-an-envelope study, Nature has found that Wikipedia is as accurate as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. There are a whole raft of things that are wrong with the study, but the two are starting to be meaningfully compared, which is a great place to start.

Wikipedia is growing fast. The encyclopaedia has added 3.7 million articles in 200 languages since it was founded in 2001. The English version has more than 45,000 registered users, and added about 1,500 new articles every day of October 2005. Wikipedia has become the 37th most visited website, according to Alexa, a web ranking service.

Wikipedia has serious problems as an authority, but then so do traditional print encyclopedias (such things as timeliness, bias towards the country of production and space limitations), but we're familiar with the limitations of the print encyclopedias so they do not worry us, whereas the different limitations electronic encyclopedias are still being explored. What is unfortunate is that the Nature study only had domain experts finding errors, rather than fixing them, an aspect in which Wikipedia beats Britannica hands down.

I'm sure Jimmy Wales (pictured) and the rest of the editorial team will continue to tweak the editorial, social and technical controls, as they has in the past.