Re: Citation needed
Reinforcing the false impression that Wikipedia consistently achieves a level of accuracy comparable to that of Britannica really doesn't help. Interestingly, it's a hoax in itself that compounds the problem.
For a start, Wikipedia contains millions of articles on pop culture, sports, companies, business schools, villages and other minor topics that no one will ever be able to conduct a comparative study on, simply because other encyclopedias don't cover them. (Britannica has no article on Amelia Bedelia, for example, or the Boston point-shaving scandal.) The Wikipedia articles on Neptune, the Aral Sea or Barack Obama may be quite excellent, but it's the more obscure articles where Wikipedia's vetting lets the site down, and bad edits slip through.
And those bad edits are a qualitatively different problem from those Britannica and other traditional encyclopedias suffered from: they did not outsource some of their content writing to stoned sophomores, hoaxers, political extremists, revenge peddlers or PR companies operating under the cover of anonymity.
People see Wikipedia described as an encyclopedia and mistakenly assume that all its content is vetted by the site's administrators before publication, in much the same way that editors and specialists did their best to verify the content of conventional encyclopedias before going to press. (Any Wikipedian can tell you otherwise.)
It's an impression the Wikimedia Foundation often fosters, praising the vigilance of its anonymous volunteers and citing studies on Wikipedia's reliability that gave the site a passing grade. In doing so, they're doing knowledge a disservice. It would be much more helpful if they told people to be alert, check references and so on (as Amir Aharoni, to his credit, did in that interview).
P.S.
I don't know if you've ever read a traditional encyclopedia, but they're not "just a compilation of sources". Traditional encyclopedia articles didn't even list their sources. They didn't have to, because they employed expert writers trusted to have a full grasp of the topic's literature, and the ability to summarise key findings for the public. Listing sources for everything is Wikipedia's invention, as an alternative way of establishing content credibility.
Nature's famous Britannica–Wikipedia comparison, by the way, only compared a small number of science topics and firmly concluded that even in this topic area, which is one of Wikipedia's strongest, the site contained a third more errors than Britannica, and was much less well written. I'm not aware of any studies concluding that Wikipedia is more trustworthy than Britannica, but if you have seen one, I'd be interested in looking at it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
