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.