Three months after well-respected journal Nature published a study that claimed Wikipedia is almost as accurate as the 200-years old Encyclopædia Britannica, the Britannica dinosaur has awaken from it's slumber and has striken back: Fatally Flawed: Refuting the recent study on encyclopedic accuracy by the journal Nature (and of course their responce had to be published in a pdf...). As might have been expeted, Britannica claims that "Almost everything about the journal’s investigation, from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading." The Nature has replied declining their request to retract the article and "rejected those accusations".
The story has already made it to mainsteam media, so you can keep track of the recent developments with Google News.
See also Wikipedia Village Pump (news) discussion on this subject.
And in releated news, this should stirr the waters even further: there is a paper coming in Journal of American History, claiming that "the prose on Wikipedia is not so terrific but most of its facts are indeed correct, to a far greater extent than Wikipedia's critics would like to admit".
PS. In case you wonder, Wikipedia has corrected all the errors by late January 2006. As for Britannica... who knows? They claim to have no errors, after all. :>
TTags: Wikipedia, Britannica, Nature.
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