Popular Posts

Thursday, December 15, 2005

The peer review between Encyclopaedia Britannica and Wikipedia

The peer review

We chose 50 entries from the websites of Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica on subjects that represented a broad range of scientific disciplines. All entries were chosen to be approximately the same length in both encyclopaedias. In a small number of cases some material, such as reference lists, was removed to make the lengths of the entries more similar.

Each pair of entries was sent to an expert for peer review. The reviewers, who were not told which article was which, were asked to look for three types of inaccuracy: factual errors, critical omissions and misleading statements. A total of 42 useable reviews were returned. These were examined by Nature’s news reporters, who tallied the total inaccuracies for each entry.

No comments:

My Google Profile