Problems Sprout For Nature Over Wikipedia

"Almost everything about the journal's investigation, from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading," says Britannica.

"Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannica were not inaccuracies at all, and a number of the articles Nature examined were not even in the Encyclopedia Britannica. The study was so poorly carried out and its findings so error-laden that it was completely without merit."

"Dozens of the so-called inaccuracies they attributed to us were nothing of the kind; they were the result of reviewers expressing opinions that differed from ours about what should be included in an encyclopedia article. In these cases Britannica's coverage was actually sound."

I found that it was something less than I had expected. It is not one of the peer-reviewed, expert-written research articles for which the journal is renowned. (UPDATE: I confirmed this with the article's author, Jim Giles. In an e-mail to me, he wrote, "The article appeared in the news section and is a piece of journalism, so it did not go through the normal peer review process that we use when considering academic papers.") Rather, it's a fairly short, staff-written piece based on an informal survey carried out by a group of Nature reporters.

The open source model is not a democratic model. It is the combination of community and hierarchy that makes it work. Community without hierarchy means mediocrity.