Reply #4: Related article at The Register [View All]

[Book Lover]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/23/britannica_wikipedia_nature_study/

Nature mag cooked Wikipedia study

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Independent experts were sent 50 unattributed articles from both Wikipedia and Britannica, and the journal claimed that Britannica turned up 123 "errors" to Wikipedia's 162.

But Nature sent only misleading fragments of some Britannica articles to the reviewers, sent extracts of the children's version and Britannica's "book of the year" to others, and in one case, simply stitched together bits from different articles and inserted its own material, passing it off as a single Britannica entry.

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In one case, for example. Nature's peer reviewer was sent only the 350 word introduction to a 6,000 word Britannica article on lipids - which was criticized for containing omissions.

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Nature accompanied this favorable news report with a cheerful, spin-heavy editorial (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438890a.html) that owed more to an evangelical recruitment drive than it did a rational analysis of empirical evidence. It urged readers to "push forward the grand experiment that is Wikipedia."

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The original Nature article is here http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html