If you’re a writer who’s had to endure editing by committee, bad news: the single biggest example of that practice appears to work.
I speak of Wikipedia, which has had a pretty lousy week or two of press what with the maligning of individuals and the class action lawsuit and the Adam Curry. But just as style guides across the continent were about to start requiring that the word “Wikipedia” always be preceded on first mention by the word “embattled” (see entry for “Apple“), Nature magazine came riding to the rescue:
Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries, a Nature investigation finds….
Several recent cases have highlighted the potential problems…. However, an expert-led investigation carried out by Nature — the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica’s coverage of science — suggests that such high-profile examples are the exception rather than the rule.
The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.
I still have a healthy skepticism about Wikipedia’s entries, and I’ve learned to treat any information I glean from the site less as the final word and more as a handy starting point for future research.
But what a starting point it is – and what an amazing example, warts and all, Wikipedia provides of the capacity of a very disparate online community to come together and build something very worthwhile… and something I’d miss very much if it were to vanish. The Nature article couldn’t have come at a better time.
