Wikipedia
In response to news that Chinese govenment were blocking access to Wikipedia due to "sensitive" articles (including one about the Tiananmen Square student protest), I headed over to Wikipedia to check it out. I was rather surprised to encounter a piece of wiki vandalism, the first that I have ever seen, under the entry for China (pictured). After a few seconds however it was reverted back to a previous revision, a testement to the robustness of wikipedia and the dedication of its contributors.
Wikipedia has been criticised recently for making it too easy for people to add defamatory comments, especially on biographies. Unfortunatly there is no solution to this that will not fundamentally alter the wiki dynamic. However as Wikipedia's popularity grows incidents of this nature will be noticed quickly and amended.
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The journal Nature, published an article investigating the acuracy of Wikipedia compared to the acuracy of Encyclopaedia Britannica (EB). It suggested that Wikipedia had about 4 errors per acticle and EB about 3. It also notes that EB articles tend to be better stuctured and written in better english. However I think this is mainly the result of the extensive editing that has been employed. As wikipedia articles get older they will eventually be edited into the kind of material one might expect from EB.
As a good takehome fact consider the following:
The EN was first published in 1768 and could be purchased for six-pence. It now consists of 32 volumes, 120,000 articles and about 44,000,000 words. It can be viewed for free but a hard copy costs $1400. By comparison Wikipedia was started in january 2001, and today consists of over 3,100,000 articles about 910,000 of which are in English. It is and always will be completely free.
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