Britannica, Naturally
In case you have not been following the story: Nature set out to evaluate how Wikipedia, the on-line collaborative Encyclopedia, compared to Encyclopaedia Britannica’s on-line resources with regards to accuracy of scientific entries. They sent 42 pairs of edited articles to a number of researchers according to their specialization and tallied the results. Nature concluded that the average Wikipedia entry contained four errors while Britannica averaged three. Britannica issued a statement [pdf] citing numerous fallacies on the part of Nature and defended roughly half the errors that Nature’s reviewers had cited. Most recently Nature responded with their own rebuttal.
I am curious as to why no one has responded from Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder, was quoted in the article as saying he was pleased with the results and that their goal was to achieve the same or better accuracy as Britannica. I wonder why Wikipedia has not issued a statement or reported as having corrected the errors cited in the Nature study. Wikipedia has documented the competition in their entry for Britannica.