David Canton – for the London Free Press – August 12, 2006
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Wikipedia recently came under attack for shoddy and inaccurate reporting of the death of Enron executive Ken Lay within its article on Lay.
The details were not accurate and the entry was changed by several people as the story unfolded in the news.
Wikipedia was intended to be an encyclopedia, not a news service. While it took a few days for the entry to sort itself out, a traditional printed encyclopedia would not have been updated until the new edition or yearbook was published. That’s assuming the editors felt it was important to mention in the first place.
Once it seemed possible to collect and contain human knowledge within the confines of a leather-bound set of encyclopedias. When Paul Skalic used the word “encyclopaedia” in the title of his 1559 publication, the modern information age may have been beyond the scope of imagination, but the goal of making reliable, scholarly information readily available to the public was taking root.
Some people are skeptical that an online publication like Wikipedia — which anyone can add to and edit — can ever be as accurate as an encyclopedia created in the traditional manner by professional authors and editors.
A study recently published in the British journal Nature concluded that Wikipedia has a level of accuracy only slightly lower than that of Encyclopaedia Britannica. It showed that, on average, there are 2.92 mistakes per article for Encyclopaedia Britannica and 3.86 for Wikipedia.
So is that good enough? For the average person wanting some quick information, it probably is. No one of course should rely on just the information in a Wikipedia entry in basing important decisions on it. But then no one in that position would rely just on the information in a traditional encyclopedia either.
To use the Britannica example again, its website boasts that there are 4,000 contributors to the 32-volume set of books. The Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite 2006 DVD contains more than 55 million words and more than 100,000 articles.
In contrast, Wikipedia has compiled nearly 1.3 million articles in English alone since its inception in 2001. Founders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger wanted to create “an international collaborative free-content encyclopedia on the Internet” where the content was created by the users.
So in the end, with Wikipedia one gets a slightly higher error rate — but, in return, it covers far more topics, has far faster updates (despite the short time it takes for controversial entries to settle down), and more information about each entry.
It’s also free to users. Not good if you are in the encyclopedia business, but good for everyone else.
Britannica’s current corporate goals are to try to recapture market share lost to competitors offering free services, such as Encarta and Wikipedia. In addition to bound volumes, it has introduced new digital technologies and online subscriptions. Britannica is relying on its past reputation for excellence and accuracy as it attempts to rebuild a viable economic future.
Britannica selected Aristotle’s quotation, “All men desire to know,” as its corporate objective. Perhaps the axiom, “All people desire to know as quickly and inexpensively as possible” more accurately depicts the modern mindset.
Despite their reputations for accuracy and excellence, traditional encyclopedia publishers realize they must offer accessible net-based resources to compete with Wikipedia or Encarta and survive as a viable business.
Quality and accuracy are respected, but breadth of selection, fast updates and free access give Wikipedia an advantage.
