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April 04, 2006, 01:23 PM ET
An Argument Over Accuracy Heats Up
Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. is intensifying its campaign to discredit a recent study, conducted by Nature, that compared it to its online competitor, Wikipedia.
In March company officials assailed Nature's report -- which found that Wikipedia's articles about science are about as accurate as those in the Encyclopaedia Britannica -- as "wrong and misleading." Now, in an "open letter" running as an advertisement in The New York Times, the encyclopedia's editors have called for a "full and public retraction of the article." The letter repeated charges, first issued in Britannica's March rebuttal, that Nature reviewed text that never appeared in the encyclopedia and failed to differentiate between minor inaccuracies and major mistakes.
The charges are, no doubt, serious ones. But in the eyes of some bloggers, Britannica's aggressiveness shows the company is desperate to defend its turf from Wikipedia, the open-source upstart. "[T]o harp upon Nature's methods is to miss the point," writes Ray Cha of if:book, a blog maintained by officials at the Institute for the Future of the Book. "Disproving Nature's methodology will have a limited effect on the growth of Wikipedia. People do not mind that Wikipedia is not perfect." (if:book)
Categories: Research
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