Nature mag cooked Wikipedia study
- From: J Flenner <varney@[redacted]>
- Subject: Nature mag cooked Wikipedia study
- Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 02:04:21 EST
Britannica's Reponse to Nature
(http://corporate.britannica.com/britannica_nature_response.pdf) [PDF, 846kb]
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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/23/britannica_wikipedia_nature_study/
Thursday 23rd March 2006 | The Register [UK]
Nature mag cooked Wikipedia study
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
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.
(snip)
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[Moderator: See also Nature's response to Britannica's critique at
http://www.nature.com/press_releases/Britannica_response.pdf . I'm not
aware of any further iterations of the Nature-EB exchange
as of this posting. - JMO]