From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

Remember the study in Nature that concluded Wikipedia is about as authoritative a resource as Encyclopedia Britannica (see “Wikipedia vs. Britannica Smackdown ends in carrel throwing brawl”)? Turns out it wasn’t the rigorous piece of erudition you’d expect from the world’s foremost weekly scientific journal. In fact, it was anything but that. According to Britannica, everything about the study — from its methodology to the misleading way Nature spun the story in the media — was ill-conceived. “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,” Britannica’s editors wrote in an annihilative bit of deconstruction entitled “Fatally Flawed”. “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.”