Wikipedia Studies Itself
August 31, 2012
We think studies about oneself are fascinating. TechEYE.net shares our enthusiasm in “Wikipedia is Accurate Says, er, Wikipedia Study.” Last autumn the Wikimedia Foundation tapped Epic, an “e-learning” company, and researchers at Oxford University to perform an assessment of Wikipedia’s accuracy. The results of the reflectively funded study? Wikipedia was found to be more accurate than Encyclopaedia Britannica. What an upset! Writer Nick Ferrell notes:
“For the record, if you wrote a page on Wikipedia about yourself, you would find that one of its teams of editors had deleted it for being advertising. However when Wikipedia commissions a study into itself and reports that it is wonderful, this is apparently ok.”
Apparently. Incidentally, a 2005 external peer review showed an average of four mistakes per article, as compared to Britannica’s three. The free encyclopedia has improved markedly, it seems. The new report also found Wikipedia articles tend to be more up-to-date. No surprise there; I’ll give them that one, at least.
Ferrell observes:
“What makes us smell a rat is that the report said that there were little differences between the two on style and overall quality score. We were not aware that the Encyclopaedia Britannica articles were penned by a person with a crayon, like some of the Wikipedia articles appear to have been. Nor does the Encyclopaedia Britannica employ people with faked doctorates.”
Good point. I think I’ll wait on an objective study before I draw any conclusions.
Cynthia Murrell, August 31, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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