Nature took stories from Wikipedia and Britannica on 42 science-related topics and submitted them to experts for review. The experts were not told which encyclopedia the stories were from. "The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not great... Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopedia -- but reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica respectively."

I like this twist to the argument: it's not whether Wikipedia can get to Britannica's standard of quality; it's that we've been overestimating Britannica's quality all along.

Comments

[Bob Hawkins]

You can't trust anything. When Mathematica came out, they checked a standard book of calculus formulas, and found a significant percentage were wrong. And many of your readers will recall the Pentium floating-point bug.

And, of course, there was the famous edition of the King James Bible in which the printer dropped a critical "not," so that one of the Commandments was "Thou shalt commit adultery."

[Robert Gable]

While interesting as a benchmark, for my daily life, the Encyclopedia Britannica is irrelevant. Wikipedia is competing against semi-random links shown by Google. And competing well I might add.