Wikipedia Vs. Britannica

The contenders...

VS

(Wikipedia 2008) (Britannica 2008)

This battle is akin to one of Mike Tyson vs. Evander Holyfield. Much has been said about Wikipedia's credibility. On the contrary, could one complain considering it is an infinite library of knowledge, available for FREE? Beggars can't be choosers, can they?

According to CNET News(2005), Wikipedia is about as good a source of accurate information as Britannica,the venerable standard-bearer of facts about the world around us.

However, Wikipedia suffered hiccups when an article written linked former journalist, John Seigenthaler to the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and John F. Kennedy. At the same time, the blogosphere was buzzing for several days about podcasting pioneer, Adam Curry when he was being accused of anonymously deleting references to others' seminal work on the technology(CNET News 2005)

In response to situations like these and others in its history, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has always maintained that the service and its community are built around a self-policing and self-cleaning nature that is supposed to ensure its articles are accurate(CNET News 2005).

A study by Nature, showed that on average, Britannica makes 2.92 mistakes per article and Wikipedia 3.86(CNET News 2005).

While the error rate for each encyclopedia was not insignificant, such numbers demonstrate that broad review of encyclopedia articles is needed. The results prove favourable to Wikipedia, going head on with a contender that applies subscription rates. People generally think information found on Britannica are more credible than Wikipedia's because they are peer-reviewed. However, results from the reserach conducted by Nature prove otherwise.

According to Nielsen and Morkes (1997), credibility is a essential on the web as users do not want to be “fed with false facts”. On a personal note, I reckon Wikipedia could pose more credible by getting its content peer-reviewed from time-to-time as well as to rate its moderators while exposing the minority bad apples.


References

CNET News 2005, 'Study: Wikipedia As Accurate As Britannica', viewed at <http://news.cnet.com/Study-Wikipedia-as-accurate-as-Britannica/2100-1038_3-5997332.html>, on 10 June 2008.

Morkes, J & Nielsen, J 1997, Concise, scannable, and objective: How to write for the web, viewed at http://www.useit.com/, on 7 June 2007.