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Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia
- ComputerGuru 15y agoYou know, that's a ridiculously short list. I was honestly expecting something much, much longer for a crowdsourced errata-discovery spanning 32 volumes. Kudos to Encyclopedia Britannica on doing a good job.
- CJefferson 15y agoI know, it's impressive. I am sure I, like many people, have found dozens of errors in Wikipedia. I used to try to correct them, but gave up when my changes would get reverted, even with references.
- twelvechairs 15y agoI'm sure there must be an equal and inverse list for errors in Wikipedia that are correct in Britannica, and lets not even get started on things explained in Britannica with clarity and brevity where Wikipedia doodles on minutiae. Seriously - I'm not quite sure what the point of this is, other than as a Wikipedia PR exercise.
- bunderbunder 15y agoAnd let's not forget that recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education where Wikipedians were obstinately refusing to allow an authority on the subject to fix some errors in an article on the Haymarket Affair, or even to take his input on how the article should be fixed. Their official position on the subject was, as I remember, to point out that Wikipedia articles aren't meant to represent the facts; they're meant to represent popular conceptions. (Perhaps that's why their articles on health topics tend to be so bad about parroting pseudoscientific hogwash?)
- gee_totes 15y agoYup, the standard for inclusion on Wikipedia is "Verifiability, Not Truth", which I feel is a sad reflection on our post-modern age.
- bunderbunder 15y agoIt's funny, a long time ago the prevailing definition of knowledge among philosophers was "justified true belief". Then Gettier came along in the 60s and rained on everyone's parade, and it became clear that those three criteria were not sufficient. Meanwhile, Wikipedia's official position is, in essence, that you only need to have two of them to have knowledge. Which is ironically something of a step back to the way scholars were doing it in the Middle Ages.