Nature, the best in science journalism as they say about themselves, has compared Wikipedia with (the old and edited and therefore better???) Encylopaedia Britannica.
You know, it seems to me that what comparisons such of these are missing is the time arrow. It compared Wikipedia as of 1 Oct 2005 to the 2002 edition of Encyclopedia Brittanica, say. For instance:
Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.
You'd think that, by 25 Dec 2005, at least some of those errors will have been worked on -- particularly if the reviewers disclosed what they came up with. Yes, this was of course a sampling approach, and the error-counting meant to represent some larger set. But to the extent that Wikipedia is an infrastructure for peer-based content creation, not a frozen product with a release date, it seems to me if journalists wish to represent it more accurately they should be adding the time dimension to their descriptions. Otherwise it's a bit like announcing definitively what The Web has to say about something, isn't it? True at some particular point in time, but not a done deal. cheers Bram