Re: Is there a genealogy Wiki anywhere?

In article
<b247a38a-e529-4848-a736-e5371a397142@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, Daniel
Morgan wrote:

[snip]

> In 2005, the journal Nature got 42 expert reviewers to compare science
> articles in Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica for accuracy.  To
> quote from their original writeup, "the difference in accuracy was not
> particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained
> around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three."
> 
> Britannica disputed the Nature study.  Nature rebutted their rebuttal
> and stood by their original findings.  See Editorial, Nature 440, 582
> (30 March 2006).

  It's hardly informative that Nature stood by their own article.
But we can also observe that the article was not one of their science
articles, which would have had to pass through peer-review itself 
before publication.  It was a news article.

  Reading the Brittanica response, rather than Nature alone, is
quite informative.  The response is at
 http://cor****ate.britannica.com/britannica_nature_response.pdf

  One of their comments, which squares with what I see when I look
at Wikipedia in areas of my expertise, is about the scope of errors.
Nature re****ted only the number (which was higher at wikipedia) but
not scope.  The scale of error is quite often very high at wikipedia.
My thumbnail description is that serious sources might say there
were 17 species of something instead of the true 19 -- an error, and
certainly we'd want the right number.  But at wikipedia, you're quite
possibly going to see 19,000 instead of 19.  (Or, in one case for
an ancestor of mine, his town's elevation being 'eleventy-billion feet'.)


-- 
Robert Grumbine http://www.radix.net/~bobg/
Science faqs and amateur
activities notes and links.
Sagredo (Galileo Galilei) "You present these recondite matters with too
much 
evidence and ease; this great facility makes them less appreciated than
they 
would be had they been presented in a more abstruse manner." Two New
Sciences