Britannica doesn't contain outright hoaxes and nonsense. Examples:
https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday... https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/08/11/wikipedias-credibility...
But Britannica can never be as up to date as Wikipedia:
https://www.inputmag.com/culture/queen-elizabeth-ii-death-wi...
Nor can it cover as many topics as Wikipedia.
Wikipedia's quality also depends on the topic area. Hard science and computing tend to be covered more adeptly than philosophy for example.
And article quality simply varies much more in Wikipedia. It ranges from some of the finest writing anywhere, rivalling anything in Britannica and surpassing it in up-to-dateness, to complete rubbish and intentionally falsified content.
I did this analysis long ago and i don't have the set in front of me, but there absolutely were hoaxes and nonsense which were believed to be true (or which fit the prevailing narrative) in 1970.
Not being up to date isn't just about incorporating new information. Fields like social sciences have huge revisions and reversals because conclusions in those fields are so often rooted in opinion and inference rather than empirical observation.
Yet, no teacher would complain about using an old copy of Britannica.
At any rate, here is a quote from a BBC journalist: "In the Wikipedia gullibility stakes, no one is infallible. That means any journalist in any newsroom will likely get a sharp slap across the head from an editor for treating Wikipedia with anything but total scepticism (you can imagine the kicking I've taken over this article)."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-37523772
I doubt any journalist ever got such a kicking because they cited Britannica.
You know in the world of tech they have a similar saying: "No one ever got fired for buying IBM."
This does not mean IBM is either a superior choice, or a wise choice.
I consult it maybe four or five times a year, and the Britannica website maybe another dozen times or so.
Still, it's good to always be aware that the ways Wikipedia and Britannica are produced are very different and to factor that in (see my post below from just a couple of minutes ago, about the desert article).
If however we were to go look up 'Mars' .. or 'electron' and find hoaxes there, then there would be a clear and obvious problem
False info inserted: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Desert&diff=prev&...
False info deleted: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Desert&diff=60327...
The desert article was classified as a "Good article" during that time and got about a million views. This is not an obscure article, nor was the article on Maurice Jarre at the time of his death, which is why the hoax instantly entered newspapers around the world.
So I accept your point to a degree: many of the topics mentioned in that article are very obscure, but even a high-visibility, highly trafficked article can contain absolute balderdash mixed in with solid information and really good writing.
I'm also not trying to make an argument against Wikipedia – I am a Wikipedian and I love Wikipedia, and use it daily, but it's important to be aware of its weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
But you know I was just thinking earlier today reading a Wikipedia article and looking at some of the citations, and I thought that even with it's shortcomings, it has the potential to make readers, especially those that are curious, actually question what they're reading.. And I think when compared to like Britanica, thats a very positive aspect.
Meaning.. I know that citations are all over academia and research areas, but they aren't in a lot of k-9 textbooks .. and maybe for someone who doesn't go on to higher education, they can potentially have that questioning-effect.
"There has been lots of research on the accuracy of Wikipedia, and the results
are mixed—some studies show it is just as good as the experts, others show
[that] Wikipedia is not accurate at all."
They found that in general, Wikipedia articles were more biased—with 73
percent of them containing code words, compared to just 34 percent in
Britannica.
I'm not sure that's a great measure of bias. It's easy to write in an unbiased tone, yet still be biased.
However, you just made my point, which is that, "random online information can often be wrong or conflict with other online authorities."
But wikipedia is far ahead on more practical like which way the toilet paper goes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_orientation
I am right handed and prefer to have the paper oriented over itself.
A member of my family is left handed and prefers to have the paper under itself. She once said that for her, with left handedness, having the paper under itself makes it easier to grab.
To be clear, I think it would be far fairer to say something to the effect of:
>The goal isn't accuracy, it's expediency
I would argue that a majority of the people who use Wikipedia do not know, care, or have ever looked at the efforts done on Wikipedia to document changes. Transparency, to the people to serves, is then irrelevant. I would, however argue that people do expect information on Wikipedia to be up to date. That they want a relatively short account of a topic, with the most relevant information available.
Basically, wikipedia is McDonald's. Fast, quick, easy. When you want something high quality, you go to a "sit down" restaurant where they prepare it individually. It takes a lot longer, costs more, and is presented in an entirely different manner. The intentions, use case, and clientele of each are not the same, but they do overlap from time-to-time. It is a mistake to compare one to the other. They serve different purposes.
I’d bet any mining of actually working citations would average closer to 2015. It used to be people citing something from the 70’s or 80’s would get strange looks from people who lived then, now I see Millenials looking at Gen-Z kids that way.
History is written not by the victor, but by the last wiki editor.
Also various other newspaper archives have mind-numbing amounts of scanned material dating back well over 100 years, and the Wikipedia Library provides free access to these resources for editors.
This just isn't true. Most wikipedia references have a hyperlink and a proper citation which can be looked up using traditional means. For example, a cite might look like this:
"Intel Pentium Processor G6950 (3M Cache, 2.80 GHz) with SPEC Code(s) SLBMS". Ark.intel.com. 2010-07-13. Archived from the original on 2011-03-09. Retrieved 2010-07-29.
The link to intel.com has rotted, but:
1) There's an archive of the page so the information hasn't been lost
2) There's also a full citation, with which you can write a letter to Intel asking them for the document in question ("Intel Pentium Processor G6950 (3M Cache, 2.80 GHz) with SPEC Code(s) SLBMS"). This is a lot more detail than you'd have in a traditional encyclopedia. If you're a researcher, the encyclopedia has given what you need to seek more detail from the primary source - and that's the whole point!
archive.org and wikipedia.org working together is really powerful.
In terms of book references Wikipedia simply wins, hands down. Those don't rot.
It's unclear what your point is. Are you suggesting wikipedia shouldn't also have citations to content published online, simply because it might be removed?
There are 81 citations. Of these, only 9 are not citing published books with an ISBN, or articles published in journals.
4 are citations to papers or articles published by physics professors on their university websites (Berkeley, Riverside, CUNY, Caltech)
Three are links to magazines: Quanta Magazine, Scientific American, Physics World
The remaining two are a link to the Nobel Foundation (regarding a nobel prize award) and a link to Merriam-Webster for a definition of "Quantum."
> At best you can get some people's opinion about something.
Nah, not even close.
Cherry picking can only occur if I'm generalizing, and I am not. Counter-examples aren't cherry-picking.
Your statement "At best you can get some people's opinion about something" has been disproven.
"Wiki" is a type of software, like "editor" or "web browser". It is not the name of wikipedia.
Yes yes, language evolves, but this is like someone deleting the Internet Explorer link from their Windows desktop and saying "I deleted the internet from this computer, I don't have the internet any more".
If you want an eye opening experience pick something in the news that might be scientific. Say, COVID. Then run a correlation between the release of news articles and the frequency of edits to Wikipedia.
In theory, this provides the most up to date information. In reality, Wikipedia is a disinformation farm. Contributors may think they are updating the "latest" version of "truth" (like a "fact" checker) but in reality they are making knee jerk decisions to sometimes literally change the definition of something.
Still not convinced a paper encyclopedia is better? Still worried a scary private corporation controls Encyclopedias? Steven Pruitt is a legendary "editor" (what an appropriate name) of wikipedia. Holding the record for the most Wikipedia edits of anyone by a large margin, he is a veritable gatekeeper of what Wikipedia defines as truth. Whereas in a corporation you might have this divided among dozens of experts in their field, one man with no known expertise in anything and a dramatically one-sided and well-known political leaning is in control of a LOT of information.
In summary, I refuse to donate to Wikipedia and actively promote other sources of information (such as scholarly articles, meta-analyses, expert blog posts, etc) as better secondary or primary sources of information. Parents, teachers, and schools are absolutely right to be suspect of Wikipedia. Aside from relatively niche, infrequently edited articles, Wikipedia is no better than asking your neighbor what he thinks about a subject. At least you might get a beer out of doing that, though.
Someone with millions of edits does not de-facto have the systems in place, the time, and the power to influence any article he puts his mind to? What I posted is inference, not misinformation, and worth considering despite the downvote parade happening on it right now by pro-wiki shills.
To call what I posted misinformation is a sign of times. Inference is not misinformation and while I have no "fact checked" articles proving he manipulates wiki articles he is a defacto central power of Wikipedia whose contributions are vast. So vast, in fact, they shadow every other contributor by orders of magnitude. If this doesn't concern you I guess by all means, cite wikipedia in all your scholarly works. Isn't my problem, anyway. I don't use it and I don't donate to it. I have no dog in this race.
Ignoring Pruitt my point stands in general. Wikipedia edits spike during times of political strife, elections, major news, etc. They are edited so frequently that it's impossible to tell what is real and fake. This is the principle failing of any truly open system that does no KYC. It inevitably collapses under the weight of idiots (which have more density than smart people). If Wikipedia expects to be trusted authors should be credential-locked to fields and vetted by the community. Except that can't happen because then you'd have to pay for it, and then it's not wikipedia.
I'd rather have vetted experts writing articles on their fields (e.g. an actual encyclopedia) than any random shmuck off the street being able to contribute to an alleged body of "knowledge". Right now I can go contribute to the article on theoretical physics. Something I know nothing about. That should not be possible on any system alleging to be a source of truth.
In reality the internet is full of systems with open participation. We don't see them failing notably more or less often than other systems. I think a (personal, mental) model that makes inaccurate predictions is possibly flawed, and may need to be revisited a bit.
If you've looked into Epistemology before, you'll see that Capital-T Truth is a slippery thing to actually define properly. Indeed, thus, Wikipedia makes no claim to being a Source Of Truth. Wikipedia makes a more cautious claim. It claims to be an encyclopedia: A tertiary source representing what primary and secondary sources say about a matter.
So if you keep that in mind, you are actually quite welcome to contribute to an article on theoretical physics. If you put in the work to study, track down sources, and understand what they're saying, then that's a good start. If you can then use that information to write a coherent text explaining the concepts, then that's perfect.
There's no magic fairy dust that turns you into an expert. If you work hard and do the same things any other expert would be doing, then how should we treat you?
That's like saying billionaires, corporations, media etc don't have a lot of influence (or control) over elections because everyone can theoretically donate money, outvote them etc. too.
For a sample of my work, see:
No amount of wiki editors can protect you from “mob” changes on their platform.
I always thought you were a bit eccentric, but you seemed to be fairly sane otherwise, and managed to always keep yourself out of trouble. How did you manage to get yourself sitebanned of all things? %-(
I mean, arbcom reviewed it too, so it's not just a mob. Did you get tempted into saying or doing something unwise?
I hope you're doing ok now at least.
By the time I was able to read, we had two separate complete editions of the Brittanica, and he'd read both through, A-Z.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33124973
> Give a single example of how the Encyclopedia Britannica be worse than random idiots, foreign agents, and shills on Wikipedia.
I received no answer, which is what I expected. It was easier to flag the comment, because this forum is pathetic.
My grandparents had bought a copy of Britannica decades ago and they had something like 50 years of its yearbooks. I would cite it sometimes and no one at school batted an eye. I remember reading through it and cross-referencing articles against Wikipedia and Wikipedia's accuracy was far superior.
The thing to keep in mind is that not only are all encyclopedias fraught with errors, primary sources are often wrong too! The goal isn't perfection, it's transparency -- and Wikipedia in this department is enormously better than any private encyclopedia you'll ever find.