aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Britannica v Wikipedia revisited

The Times looks critically at the Nature study that blind-compared Britannica and Wikipedia - “The question is whether to trust an encyclopedia that evolves like an organism or one that was designed like a machine.” - and concludes:

Whatever their shortcomings, neither encyclopedia appears to be as error-prone as one might have inferred from Nature, and if Britannica has an edge in accuracy, Wikipedia seems bound to catch up.

The idea that perfection can be achieved solely through deliberate effort and centralized control has been given the lie in biology with the success of Darwin and in economics with the failure of Marx.

It seems natural that over time, thousands, then millions of inexpert Wikipedians - even with an occasional saboteur in their midst - can produce a better product than a far smaller number of isolated experts ever could.

Meanwhile the competition has some catching up to do. While Wikipedia includes a good, balanced article on the history of Britannica, Britannica has not a word to say about Wikipedia, as it rapidly becomes one of the most significant phenomena on the Net.

SEE ALSO: My post Whose Faith-Based encyclopedia?