Re: Wikipedia Becomes Internet Force, But Faces Crisis

>> >>> >>>> 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'm astonished that a 25% difference is considered "not particularly >>> great". >> I'm astonished that something that can be explained by "jitter" of >> "plus/minus one count" in 'ordinal' numeric data, would be considered >> anything _other_ than "not particularly great". Well, unless they do >> not really understand statistical analysis, that is. >> 3 vs 4 is jitter. > 126 vs. 168 is a bigger difference, though it's the same 25%. > (Unless you believe that there are a lot of off-by-one errors, _all_ > in the same direction.)

Except that these numbers were averages, not actual counts. But then they rounded them off for the article. It's possible that around four is 3.7, and about 3 is 3.4, so they're actually much closer; but they could also be 2.8 and 4.3, a 35% difference.

But what they also didn't include in the article was information about the distribution, standard deviation, etc. If most of the articles in Wikipedia have 3-5 innacuracies, while most of the Brittanica articles have 2-4, that's a significant overlap. On the other hand, if 2/3 of Wikipedia articles have no errors, and the other third have 10-14, while Brittanica is 90% clean with the other 10% having around 30 errors, that's quite different.

Barry Margolin, snipped-for-privacy@alum.mit.edu Arlington, MA

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