Nature mag cooked Wikipedia study

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Monty Solomon <monty () roscom com>
Date: March 25, 2006 9:24:29 AM EST
To: undisclosed-recipient:;
Subject: Nature mag cooked Wikipedia study


Nature mag cooked Wikipedia study

Britannica hits back at junk science

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Published Thursday 23rd March 2006 03:33 GMT

Nature magazine has some tough questions to answer after it let its
Wikipedia fetish get the better of its responsibilities to reporting
science. The Encyclopedia Britannica has published a devastating
response to Nature's December comparison of Wikipedia and Britannica,
and accuses the journal of misrepresenting its own evidence.

Where the evidence didn't fit, says Britannica, Nature's news team
just made it up. Britannica has called on the journal to repudiate
the report, which was put together by its news team.

Independent experts were sent 50 unattributed articles from both
Wikipedia and Britannica, and the journal claimed that Britannica
turned up 123 "errors" to Wikipedia's 162.

But Nature sent only misleading fragments of some Britannica articles
to the reviewers, sent extracts of the children's version and
Britannica's "book of the year" to others, and in one case, simply
stitched together bits from different articles and inserted its own
material, passing it off as a single Britannica entry.

Nice "Mash-Up" - but bad science.

...

http://www.theregister.com/2006/03/23/britannica_wikipedia_nature_study/



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