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Wikipedia - 1,000,000 english articles and growing

Wikipedia announced their one millionth English article, and claims to have 3.3 million articles in more than 125 languages. While I am an avid user of the site (as well as everyone else I know) sometimes I wonder just how accurate all the facts are. Sure, articles are labeled with "Under Review" and other disclaimers when they are caught, but how many can they catch? Assuming 5% of articles are "tainted" and only 5% of those slip through we are still talking about over 8,000 erroneous articles. Are we putting too much faith in the masses here? Are we assuming that the informed minority will be able to control the overwhelming majority who either don't know what they are talking about, or intentionally post misinformation? I'll continue to use the site and others like it, and I assume you will too, but be aware...that's all I'm saying.

Posted: Mar 02 2006, 10:52 PM by lroth | with 3 comment(s)

Comments

shughes said:

A recent study by nature compared the number of errors in wikipedia with the encyclopedia britannica, and found them to be ruoghly the same:

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html

So yes, it is accurate
# March 6, 2006 8:30 AM

lroth said:

That is an interesting article. I think the biggest flaw with it though is in the comparison. They used 50 science topics, sent the articles to field experts, and had the experts note errors. This process found that wikipedia articles aren't that much worse than britannica (4 errors on average compared to 3 in britannica)...but that is for scientific information only! And a sample size of 50 out of 1 million plus English articles is a very small percentage. The million or so articles out there about people, places, politics, pop culture, etc. could be much less accurate. Has anyone found a study on the accuracy of these topics they can point us to?
# March 7, 2006 3:23 PM

shughes said:

I guess they figured science was a topic most likely to contain errors, as most people lack a knowledge of particle physics, but probably know who Britney Spears is married to. All studies could do with bigger sample sizes, that always improves accuracy, but 50 is a small sample. I guees the point was to show wikipedia is as accurate as the very expensive alternative.
# March 8, 2006 8:29 AM
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