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Article: Wikipedia reliability.(Shorts)
- Article from:
- Townsend Letter
- Article date:
- January 1, 2009
- Author:
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Wikipedia, a free and very popular online encyclopedia, gained legitimacy in December 2005 when the prestigious journal Nature reported that Wikipedia's accuracy for science-based articles nearly equaled the highly regarded Encyclopedia Britannica. Nature's assessment was based on a study in which experts reviewed 42 pairs of scientific articles. Each pair, devoted to a single topic, consisted of one article from Britannica and one from Wikipedia. The experts, "most of [whom] chose to remain anonymous," were academic scientists, according to Britannica's refutation of the study. Nature asked the reviewers to look for factual errors, critical omissions, and misleading ...