Comments on: Nature on the hotseat for Britannica/Wiki results http://www.emailbattles.com/2006/03/23/1143151568_89/ Spam, Security, Privacy, Spyware, Phishing & Viruses from the Front Lines. Sun, 05 Jul 2009 00:44:08 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0.4 by: Arwel http://www.emailbattles.com/2006/03/23/1143151568_89/#comment-1110 Fri, 24 Mar 2006 07:23:01 +0000 http://www.emailbattles.com/2006/03/23/1143151568_89/#comment-1110 Where Wikipedia is concerned, The Register - and Andrew Orlowski in particular - is not particularly rational. Nature's reaction to Britannica's screed can be found at http://www.nature.com/press_releases/Britannica_response.pdf - which basically ends with "we do not intend to retract our article".<br> <br> Reading Britannica's "refutation", I'm amazed that their gripe in many of the comparisons is that a Wikipedia article was compared against an article from their Year Book, rather than the EB proper; I'm sure that it will come as a surprise to many readers of Encyclopaedia Britannica that they don't regard the Year Book as as authoritative as the main encyclopaedia... and this puts them at even more of a disadvantage against Wikipedia when it comes to timeliness of information. Where Wikipedia is concerned, The Register - and Andrew Orlowski in particular - is not particularly rational. Nature’s reaction to Britannica’s screed can be found at http://www.nature.com/press_releases/Britannica_response.pdf - which basically ends with “we do not intend to retract our article”.

Reading Britannica’s “refutation”, I’m amazed that their gripe in many of the comparisons is that a Wikipedia article was compared against an article from their Year Book, rather than the EB proper; I’m sure that it will come as a surprise to many readers of Encyclopaedia Britannica that they don’t regard the Year Book as as authoritative as the main encyclopaedia… and this puts them at even more of a disadvantage against Wikipedia when it comes to timeliness of information.

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