The Mighty Britannica – Wikipedia Shootout

Last week it was widely reported that editors at the prestigious science journal Nature released findings of an investigation they conducted regarding the accuracy of science articles published in the renowned Encyclopedia Britannica vs the upstart, free Wikipedia encyclopedia. In case you haven’t heard about Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org) yet, it is a rapidly growing (nearly 900,000 articles in English since it began operations in January 2001) encyclopedia resource that anyone — that’s you and me — can edit. Of course, anyone who ever wrote a paper in high school has heard of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Britannica is the probably the most respected and widely known general purpose encyclopedia in the world.

Encyclopedia Britannica’s articles are written by highly credentialed scholars and thoroughly vetted by expert reviewers who are specialists in their field. Wikipedia’s strength (and weakness) is that anyone — layperson or expert — can contribute to existing articles. Articles in Wikipedia are reviewed by members of a community of 10,000 or so volunteer editors. Wikipedia received some bitter criticism recently from a famous journalist, John Seigenthaler Sr., who discovered an article about him which included outrageous, false information that someone had written as a prank. Following this unfortunate event Wikipedia now requires contributors to register before they can create new entries in the encyclopedia. However, anyone can still edit existing articles.

For their investigation the Nature editors chose a sample of 50 science related articles of comparable length from both encyclopedias. They submitted these articles for peer review by scientists who checked them for content accuracy. The results were rather astounding. Nature found that both encyclopedias commonly had inaccurate information in their articles. Even more astounding is that, overall, articles for Wikipedia had only slightly more errors than those in Britannica. The Nature editors concluded that Britannica and Wikipedia — at least so far as scientific articles are concerned — are equally reliable sources of information. The Nature editors went on to challenge the scientific community to become more widely involved in contributing new and editing existing science related articles at Wikipedia to make this great tool even better.

Wikipedia has caused uneasiness among some librarians and other educators. After all, our job has always been to recommend reliable and authoritative sources of information. Wikipdedia’s open content approach to building articles at first glance appears to turn the notion of authority on its head. Of course the revelation about the numerous errors in Britannica challenges authority as well.

Encyclopedias provide a great way to jumpstart many research projects. They provide concise, well ordered information on a subject and often include a bibliography and other links to more detailed information in books, journals, and other sources. Students who use Wikipedia for their research should do so with the understanding that it is an imperfect tool. Always check with your professor in advance for guidance on what tools she deems appropriate for your research. There’s a treasure of information resources for you to use through our website. As a researcher, you’re a fact checker. Check your facts. Never rely just on a single source.

For more information about the quality controls in place at Wikipedia and how you can get involved in making it a better resource, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump.

Check out the Nature article comparing these tools at http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html

To listen to streaming audio of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales discussing the Nature findings checkout this podcast: http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/index.html

Check out the Wikipedia entry for USC Aiken at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_South_Carolina_Aiken

See the Wikipedia entry for the January 6, 2005 Graniteville Train Disaster at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graniteville_train_disaster.

Government Web Portals

Need government information but don’t know where to begin? The number one destination for researching United States government information on the web is the FirstGov.Gov portal website. This award winning site is exceptionally well organized. There are four major sections devoted to:

• Citizens
• Businesses and Non-profit Organizations
• Federal Employees and
• Government to Government

You can browse by organization in an A to Z agency index and by executive, legislative, or judicial branch agency listings. FirstGov also points to state and local government level and selected non-profit association websites.

In recent years the federal government has taken advantage of subject oriented web domain names to create cross-agency web portals that help researchers to drill down to needed information on a particular topic. A few cross-agency portals are listed below. You can expect to see more subject oriented government portals coming online in the future.

* Arts.Gov – http://www.arts.gov
* Business.Gov – http://www.business.gov
* Census.Gov http://www.census.gov
* Consumer.Gov – http://www.consumer.gov
* DisabilityInfo.Gov – http://www.disabilityinfo.gov
* FedStats.Gov – http://www.fedstats.gov
* Forms.Gov – http://www.forms.gov
* Grants.Gov – http://www.grants.gov
* Health.Gov – http://www.health.gov
* Humanities.Gov – http://www.humanities.gov
* Kids.Gov – http://www.kids.gov
* OnGuardOnline.Gov – http://onguardonline.gov
* Recalls.Gov – http://www.recalls.gov
* Regulations.Gov – http://www.science.gov
* Science.Gov – http://www.science.gov
* Seniors.Gov – http://www.seniors.gov
* Students.Gov – http://www.students.gov
* StudentJobs.Gov – http://www.studentjobs.gov
* WomensHealth.Gov – http://womenshealth.gov

South Carolina’s offical state government web portal recently received a much needed major renovation. It was formerly located at http://myscgov.com. You can reach it now at http://www.sc.gov or http://www.southcarolina.gov.

Happy surfing!