A while ago I mentioned that I sometimes use Wikipedia as a source of information, and that I have submitted a few articles to the site as well. Unfortunately, in the past week Wikipedia has been under attack because of errors purposefully entered into an article as a prank. Just in time to save me, an article in this week’s issue of Nature has compared the accuracy of scientific articles in Wikipedia versus the same articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Here’s a link to the 50 articles, representing a wide range of scientific disciplines, that were selected for this study. The articles, which had to be of similar length, were sent to experts for peer review. The experts were asked to find three types of errors: factual errors, critical omissions, and misleading statements. The authors of the study found that articles in Wikipedia had an average of four errors, while Britannica articles had an average of three. Of the eight very serious mistakes, each source had four.  I thought the results were pretty significant, but I wonder if this is true of other topic areas. Does the layperson stays away from scientific articles? Do articles about celebrities contain more errors than articles about ribosomes, for example? I would hypothesize that there are more searches in Wikipedia for Gwen Stefani than there are for DNA Replication.

Here’s a link to the story on CNN. What do you think?