Fwd: Britannica says Nature mag cooked Wikipedia study

[Henk Vreekamp]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Omdat de media hier geen aandacht aan besteden, even iets voor onze
wetenschappelijke vrijwilligers.
hv,u
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>Date:         Thu, 23 Mar 2006 09:07:55 -0600
>To: CARR-L at LISTSERV.LOUISVILLE.EDU
><http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/23/britannica_wikipedia_nature_study/>
>[Excerpt]
>
>Nature magazine has some tough questions to answer after it let its
>Wikipedia fetish get the better of its responsibilities to reporting
>science. The Encyclopedia Britannica has published a devastating
>response to Nature's December comparison of Wikipedia and Britannica,
>and accuses the journal of misrepresenting its own evidence.
>
>Where the evidence didn't fit, says Britannica, Nature's news team just
>made it up. Britannica has called on the journal to repudiate the
>report, which was put together by its news team.
>Independent experts were sent 50 unattributed articles from both
>Wikipedia and Britannica, and the journal claimed that Britannica turned
>up 123 "errors" to Wikipedia's 162.
>
>But Nature sent only misleading fragments of some Britannica articles to
>the reviewers, sent extracts of the children's version and Britannica's
>"book of the year" to others, and in one case, simply stitched together
>bits from different articles and inserted its own material, passing it
>off as a single Britannica entry.
>
>"Almost everything about the journal's investigation, from the criteria
>for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text
>and its headline, was wrong and misleading," says Britannica.
>
>"Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannica were not
>inaccuracies at all, and a number of the articles Nature examined were
>not even in the Encyclopedia Britannica. The study was so poorly carried
>out and its findings so error-laden that it was completely without merit."
>
>In one case, for example. Nature's peer reviewer was sent only the 350
>word introduction to a 6,000 word Britannica article on lipids -- which
>was criticized for containing omissions.

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