Long, long ago, way back in the year two-thousand and five, the journal Nature published a study (we discussed it here) that found that the Encyclopedia Britannica (a venerable, respected reference work), on balance, contained about the same number of errors per article as Wikipedia (the online, “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”). This month, Britannica pushes back with a heavily footnoted twenty page report offering blow-by-blow refutations of claims made in the Nature study.

Even among fans of Wikipedia (we sure find it handy), Nature’s findings rasied a few eyebrows. The community reference has suffered repeated and notorious instances of what it calls vandalism, defined as “any addition, deletion, or change to content made in a deliberate attempt to reduce the quality of the encyclopedia” – often including pointless bad jokes and swearwords. Entries about politicians and other controversial topics often seem to be in perpetual states of questionable quality due to competing attempts to mold the text, often to support specific opinions or even serve the interests of those discussed in the articles.

So it’s little surprise that Britannica has trained its monacle on Nature and dished out a muscular correction. Part of the abstract reads, “As we demonstrate below, 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.” Not to put too fine a point on it, or anything.

Ars Technica’s John Timmer boils down the report here. Britannica alleges that Nature often cited material that was either fragmentarily truncated or never appeared in the encyclopedia at all. They also called out the skills of Nature’s evaluators, accusing them of being unable to tell the difference between an error and a simplification. But as Timmer observes, that kind of “finger pointing comes down to a ‘he said/she said’ matter of how to interpret the seriousness of a given error. There is really no objective way to determine whether an editorial decision represents an appropriate simplification or a glaring omission.” Given the reputations at stake, we’re sure Nature will have something interesting to say about Britannica’s rebuttal; for what it’s worth, Wikipedia is up to date.

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