One of the more obvious criticisms of Wikipedia’s open publishing and open peer-review system is that it is prone to inaccuracies. However, according to this study (addmittedly small) from Nature Magazine, it is no more inaccurate than Encyclopaedia Britannica.
One of the extraordinary stories of the Internet age is that of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. This radical and rapidly growing publication, which includes close to 4 million entries, is now a much-used resource. But it is also controversial: if anyone can edit entries, how do users know if Wikipedia is as accurate as established sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica (link).
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Actually, Nature’s study, even if accepted at face value, found Wikipedia to be 33% more inaccurate than Britannica, with 4 errors found in Wikipedia for every 3 found in EB.
And of course, not all errors are created equal. For instance, a Nature reviewer prefers the spelling “Crotona” to Britannica’s “Crotone”. The proper English spelling of the name of this Italian town might be a bit hard to pin down, but the U.S. Board on Geographic Names and other sources agree with Britannica on this. Nature reviewers cited some Wikipedia articles as “highly misleading” or “absoultely wrong”. Are these problems really comparable?
Although several errors within Britannica were identified by the Nature review (and corrected as fast if not faster than the errors in Wikipedia), Britannica wrote a detailed response to the study, citing profound errors in the study’s premise and methodology. See http://corporate.britannica.com/britannica_nature_response.pdf.