Subscribe"The Revolution's main adversaries were the patriots and the people from Braveheart," said speaker Tim Capodice, who has edited hundreds of Wikipedia entries on subjects as diverse as Euclidian geometry and Ratfucking. "The patriots, being a rag-tag group of misfits, almost lost on several occasions. But after a string of military antics and a convoluted scheme involving chicken feathers and an inflatable woman, the British were eventually defeated despite a last-minute surge, by a score of 89-87."Somewhere in the heavens, Clio weeps ... but also snickers.
Also, magodesky, it's bad form to link to a study that "proves" a point when there exist widely publicized follow up studies that savage the biased methodologies of the initial research.Criticism from Encyclopaedia Britannica hardly constitutes "savaging." Especially considering that they're not exactly a neutral third party. What did you expect them to say? "Yes, our product is obsolete?"
magodesky : humor, dude. humor.I understand that it's supposed to be humorous. But it's hard to laugh at something that demonstrates such a complete misunderstanding of the subject. Pretty much the same reason why Colbert's speech about Wikipedia earlier this week wasn't funny.
All of the pages relating to Steven Colbert were locked after he mentioned the site on his show, along with the entry on elephants.Which is pretty much the response I expected. Should be a clue, huh? ;-)
Except Nature admits (PDF) to most of the allegations Britannica made and basically said "That's how we designed our study".That's just a blatant misrepresentation of Nature's defense. Their point is that Britannica is taking issue with points that aren't significant to the validity of the study.
But in all seriousness, I read the EB response and I have to agree with jonson that Nature was savaged, nay indeed trounced.Really? Because as far as I can tell, most of Britannica's criticisms are nitpicks at best and outright distortions at worst. I'm not saying that Nature's study is perfect. No study is. That's why we have replication. But trounced? I'm just not seeing it.
In one instance Britannica alleges that we provided a reviewer with material that was not from the Britannica website. We have checked and are confident that this was not the case.
Britannica objects that Nature did not check the assertions of its reviewers. This is true; nor did we claim to. We realised that in some cases our reviewers’ criticisms would be open to debate, and in some cases might be wrong. But this applied as much to criticisms of Wikipedia as of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Because the reviewers were blind to the source of the material they were evaluating, and material from both sources was treated the same way, there is absolutely no reason to think that any errors they made would have systematically altered the results of our inquiry.
We note that Britannica has taken issue with less than half the points our reviewers raised. Both encyclopaedias have made corrections to some of the relevant entries since our article was published.
We do not intend to retract our article.
Britannica's online statement says the we sometimes sent reviewers only opening summaries of an entry, and ignored the rest of the article. This was not an oversight, but a deliberate response to the structure of the information available. Both encyclopaedias often have a single entry that serves as a summary of a subject and which includes numerous links out to entries on specific aspects of that subject. In these cases, we felt it made sense to compare the summaries, which are themselves several hundred words long. We were careful in these cases not to cite as omissions details that could not have been expected in a summary.Basically, the problem is that Britannica isn't arranged exactly the same as Wikipedia. So Nature sent its judges only the relevant information from both for comparison. True, this may have caused some problems in the validity of Nature's study. But since the articles were being judged on factual accuracy and not on style, it's unlikely that the discrepancy would be that significant. And even if it was, since the same methodology was applied to both encyclopedias, the number of mistakes made in judging Britannica shouldn't be significantly lesser or greater than the number of mistakes made in judging Wikipedia.
Oh, please. Not providing full articles "may" have caused some problems? And was "unlikely" to create a significant discrepancy? Yeah, whatever. Get a grip on your Wiki-philia, would you? I like the site enough, and have contributed revisions myself, but your kneejerk defense of that very problematic Nature study is absurd.Well, I hope you won't be offended if I go with Nature on this one, but I think they know how to conduct a scientific study just a little bit better than some random person on the internet. But thank you for your opinion anyway.
Anansi, I think the University of Wisconsin would disagree.Actually, he's right. While the University of Wisconsin may provide guidelines for citing encyclopedia entries, it's true that just about any college-level course will expect you to use sources other than encyclopedias. Hell, my teachers stopped letting the class use encyclopedias as sources back in grade school. It's just sloppy research. Encyclopedias, whether you're talking about Wikipedia or EB, are only supposed to be used as a starting point.
But that's not true. The experts were also looking for omissions and whether the articles provided a good overview of the topic. Trying to do that with excerpts chosen by a third party is just absurd.And Nature did not count as omissions anything that couldn't have been expected from the excerpts given. What's absurd is this expectation that you can get valid results by comparing completely dissimilar information. Going by some of the comments in this thread, you might as well compare EB's entry on aldol to Wikipedia's entry on the Millennium Falcon. The reality is that a lot of the complaints being made about Nature's methodology are simply based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how research is conducted.
Also, no matter how rigorously carried out the study was, that doesn't mean it proves what you think it prove.That's what we call "validity." That's what we've been discussing all this time.
And also ^.And also ^.
Currently:My God. If this continues, people might actually learn things that are not... IMPORTANT™. And we certainly wouldn't want people to have any knowledge that hasn't been approved by Britannica.
Entry on Lutherans: 8 pages
Entry on Stephen Colbert: 11 pages.
What they didn't make clear is that Nature edited the articles...Right. Because no one would ever be able to deduce that from when they said (.DOC), "Sometimes the lengths were balanced by amalgamating two or three Britannica entries into one coherent piece – for example, 'ethanol' was done this way. We felt this represented 'everything Britannica had to say on the subject' – at least, everything we could find by a quick search of Britannica online, exactly the way a user would approach it."
That totally removed any validity from their research.How so? People keep saying that, yet nowhere in this thread do I see any connection between that complaint and the issue of validity. It should be an easy explanation if the study is really the travesty you're making it out to be.
I'm not disagreeing that directly comparing the articles is easy or even possible. What I'm complaining about is Nature (and you) presenting their results as if that's what they did.That IS what they did.
Do I have to spell it out? "I think [EB] know how to [create an encyclopedia] just a little bit better than some random person on the internet."I'm sure they do. But that's not what Wikipedia is. Wikipedia has thousands of contributors. And for every article, readers can see for themselves the entire history of what went into it.
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posted by Afroblanco at 6:50 PM on August 5, 2006