Wikipedia:External peer review/Nature December 2005

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[edit] Nature

A complete list of errors with their current status can be found at Wikipedia:External peer review/Nature December 2005/Errors

Nature compared Wikipedia and Britannica science articles and sent them to experts in the field. The number of "factual errors, critical omissions and misleading statements" were recorded.

From their blog:

We're trying to see if we can publish the full list of errors found by our reviewers, or least send them to you (and to Britannica if they want). We'll post an update here as soon as we have a firm answer.

I also received a private email from them in response to a request for more information. I hope they don't mind me posting it below:

In light of the amount of interest, we have decided to make the reviews public as far as possible, although obviously we'll have to edit them to remove the names of the reviewers, any libellous statements etc. The reviewers didn't all respond in the same format, and some of them highlighted points that we didn't consider to be significant errors, so we're also writing up an accompanying document to explain which errors we counted, and how we arrived at all the numbers. We're also asking the reviewers if they mind being identified, so we'll name those who give permission. That's all quite a bit of work, especially with Jim being away, but I hope we can send this to you by the end of next week, as well as putting it up (free) on our own website. Thanks for your patience! (15 December 2005)

Update: The reviewer reports are now available on the Nature web site, in Microsoft Word format. See above URL.

[edit] Findings

Of the 42 articles reviewed, 38 were found to have at least one error – Britannica had 40 articles with at least one error.

The following articles had the highest number of errors:

The following articles had no errors highlighted:

Nature's special report also noted the following:

  • "several Nature reviewers" found the Wikipedia article they reviewed to be "poorly structured and confusing" — a criticism that the report notes is common among information scientists;
  • unnamed information scientists also "point to other problems with article quality, such as undue prominence given to controversial scientific theories" (see Wikipedia:Guidelines for controversial articles and Wikipedia:Neutral point of view for guidelines related to this problem);
  • In Wikipedia's defense, Michael Twidale, an information scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told Nature that Wikipedia's strongest suit is the speed at which it can be updated, a factor not considered by the journal's reviewers.

Update: the detailed reviewer reports are now available (see above).

[edit] Responses

  • Dmitry Mendeleev has been tagged with {{accuracy}} by BrokenSegue - 20:48, 14 December 2005
    • All of them are now tagged. —Steven G. Johnson 02:31, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
      • And in your zest, you tagged at least one article (Cambrian explosion) that had already been rewritten. Dragons flight 02:48, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
        • I know that it had been rewritten, but we have no way whatsoever to know whether the rewritten version corrects the alleged problems. Unless we get a specific list of the criticisms from Nature, of course, we may have no choice but to remove the tags after giving the article our best look. In the short term, however, it is best to acknowledge that we take seriously reviews by such a reputable publisher. Moreover, realize that a lot of people are going to be visiting the articles that are listed in Nature right now, and it will reflect well on Wikipedia if we have some admission of the potential problems. —Steven G. Johnson 03:05, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
          • Bleh, I don't like having the "disputed" template on an article when A) you don't know what's disputed and B) you don't know if it has already been fixed. Instead I created {{NatureDispute}} and put that on Cambrian explosion, which I think serves your purpose in a friendlier way. Use it on other articles if you wish. Dragons flight 03:41, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
            • They are all retagged now with {{NatureDispute}}, which can itself be edited should anyone want to make a refinement. - Nunh-huh 04:57, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Should we ask Nature to send us a copy of the errors found? If they have such details, that is. violet/riga (t) 21:57, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

I have emailed Nature and hope they respond by publishing the results. Unfortunately, I suspect they will only be available to paying subscribers to the magazine. — Ambush Commander(Talk) 21:59, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
That's not a problem. I am a paying subscriber (well, through my university employer), as I'm sure are many other Wikipedians, and would be happy to pass along any errors that they publish. However, I doubt this is the case. I'm more worried that the review was done through the usual refereeing process, which is traditionally protective of the anonymity of the referees—they may be reluctant to simply publish the referee reports, although they might give us a summary. Or they might be persuaded to give them to a Wikipedia representative under some conditions of privacy. —Steven G. Johnson 02:30, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
Well, during the usual refereeing process, the referee reports are sent (anonymously) to the authors of the paper being examined, to allow them to improve their paper (it is got accepted) or to know why it was rejected (otherwise), so this should not be a problem. Schutz 08:24, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
I understand that, but the reports are still considered confidential; the authors do not customarily publicize them. But apparently the Nature editors are dealing with this by "sanitizing" the reports where necessary; see their response above. —Steven G. Johnson 04:50, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

Our four correct articles should be marked somehow. Could these be our first {{stable}} articles? ‣ᓛᖁ♀ᑐ 23:41, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

i didn't know there was such a thing as a stable WP article. i thought these articles were to be edited inperpetuity. i just heard about this a few minutes ago on NPR's All Things Considered. anyway, the question i have is simply, how do we know, without examination, that the reviewers were correct in every case? i took a look at the Field effect transistor article and, although i saw something i might question (dunno offhand how a constant current source becomes a voltage amplifier), but no completely glaring error in it. we should (somehow) get a detailed list of the criticism and deal with each one, one at at time. r b-j 22:02, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
I'm glad I'm not the only one who hadn't heard of Template:stable before now. However, note this:
Wales also plans to introduce a 'stable' version of each entry. Once an article reaches a specific quality threshold it will be tagged as stable. Further edits will be made to a separate 'live' version that would replace the stable version when deemed to be a significant improvement. One method for determining that threshold, where users rate article quality, will be trialled early next year.
I think it's an excellent idea. <>< tbc 00:14, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
It's an excellent idea if the selection mechanism works. Take a look at Featured Articles and then Featured Article Candidates to see the current best of the best process in action... ;) --Tsavage 00:05, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
no errors != done (they could have poor grammar or could be incomplete) Broken S 23:44, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
Makes it easier though :-) Ta bu shi da yu 02:13, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
They counted "critical omissions", so at least what we have is fairly complete. All that should be left is checking the structure... should we see what Wikipedia:Peer review thinks? ‣ᓛᖁ♀ᑐ 03:36, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
Well, the articles that are accurate should be marked somehow once article validation is turned on, don't you think? Perhaps a "externally peer-reviewed" marker? And yes, send them to Peer review, these should be FAs soon. Titoxd(?!? - did you read this?) 04:17, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
I took a look at the 7 articles with only one or no errors to see if they fit Wikipedia: Good articles, & not all would belong:
As for the remainder -- Lipid, Bjørn Lomborg, Punctuated equilibrium & Quark -- I'm willing to add them if there are no objections. -- llywrch 20:06, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
IMHO, based on working on it on and off for a while, Lomborg is at present not a "good" article. If the writing quality doesn't get you, there is a lot of basic information, much of it quite readily available elsewhere, still missing. --Tsavage 00:05, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

I like how the BBC are now headlining this "Wikipedia in face off with Encyclopedia Britannica" - somewhat misleading. violet/riga (t) 15:20, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

The headline now reads "Wikipedia survives research test", it's available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4530930.stm Walkerma 15:53, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
  • Perhaps some of us who can do good on these errors should volunteer to do a careful fact check on each of the ones marked. It would show our strengths if we could fix the errors within a week or so after they were announced. For the record, I'm happy to go over Hans Bethe, Dmitry Mendeleev, and Andreas Vesalius with a fine-toothed comb. --Fastfission 16:17, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Errors per word comparison

Please post below a table of errors/word statistics, based upon the Nature article and the word counts in the corresponding articles, so that we can see a more controlled comparison of error rates. —Steven G. Johnson 02:53, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

If it seems to make sense to calculate and compare the ratio errors/words, it probably makes less sense to compare the ratio omissions/words (1 omission in a 5000 words article might be considered to be more serious than 1 omission in a 1000 words article on the same topic, whereas 1 error in 5000 words is probably better than 1 error in a 1000 words); and it might make even less sense to mix both categories in an attempt to gauge any bias in favour or against Wikipedia (or Britannica) in the Nature experiment. I would therefore be very careful in drawing any conclusions based on the numbers in the table below. --83.180.100.151 20:48, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
Britannica displays the word count for each article, doesn't it? At least that part shouldn't take long. ‣ᓛᖁ♀ᑐ 03:29, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
You'd think that not all words are created equal. — Ambush Commander(Talk) 03:43, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
No doubt, but this seems the quickest reasonable statistic to gather. —Steven G. Johnson
Is this really more controlled? The average WP article has lots of fluff, with no space-pressure to remove same. Errors/omissions-per-article seem a reasonable metric to me. +sj + 07:37, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
Your fluff is another person's interesting tidbits. =) Honestly, it's hard to make a quantitative assessment of information content, but if there is a large difference in article length then it is a hint that apples are not being compared to apples. (Nature claims that the article lengths were comparable, but I'm finding this hard to reconcile in some cases, e.g. West Nile virus (see below) where the WP article has apparently been almost 5 times longer than EB's for a year now.) The size differences seem large enough that I'm inclined to think that the 30% difference between EB and WP in the Nature study is washed out by systematic problems, although that of course depends on the type and severity of the errors. —Steven G. Johnson 08:35, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Note that, for a fair comparison, we shouldn't include tables of contents, external links, "see also", or references — most Britannica articles do not include these, and the Nature review did not consider referencing quality. Nature refers to "factual errors, omissions or misleading statements", so some of the "errors" listed below may be errors of omission in incomplete articles, rather than factual errors.


Article name Britannica Wikipedia
Word count Errors Errors/word Word count Errors Errors/word
Acheulean industry 500 1 0.002 417 7 0.016787
Agent Orange 252 2 0.00793 1270 2 0.0015748
Aldol reaction 130 4 0.030769 660 3 0.0045455
Archimedes' principle 350 2 0.0057143 607 2 0.0032949
Australopithecus africanus 235 1 0.0042553 496 1 0.0020161
Bethe, Hans 658 1 0.0015198 1823 2 0.0010971
Cambrian explosion 519 10 0.019268 702 (13 Dec.) 11 0.0157
Cavity magnetron 394 2 0.0050761 1121 2 0.0017841
Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan 365 4 0.010959 417 0 0
CJD 591 2 0.0033841 1373 5 0.0036417
Cloud 641 3 0.0046802 1689 5 0.0029603
Colloid 561 3 0.0053476 896 6 0.0066964
Dirac, Paul 837 10 0.011947 1044 9 0.0086207
Dolly 1334 1 0.00074963 807 4 0.0049566
Epitaxy 178 5 0.028090 235 2 0.0085106
Ethanol * 315 3 0.0095238 2631 5 0.0019004
Field effect transistor 588 3 0.0051020 933 3 0.00322
Haber process 241 1 0.0041494 531 2 0.0037665
Kinetic isotope effect 210 1 0.0047619 569 2 0.0035149
Kin selection 923 3 0.0032503 404 3 0.0074257
Lipid 349 3 0.0085960 676 0 0
Lomborg, Bjorn 518 1 0.0019305 1501 1 0.00066622
Lymphocyte 479 1 0.0020877 351 2 0.0056980
Mayr, Ernst 357 0 0 753 3 0.0039841
Meliaceae 152 1 0.0065789 281 3 0.010676
Mendeleev, Dmitry 1306 8 0.0061256 1134 19 0.016755
Mutation 728 8 0.010989 1557 6 0.0038536
Neural network 557 2 0.0035907 1233 7 0.0056772
Nobel prize 409 4 0.0097800 2052 5 0.0024366
Pheromone 313 3 0.0095847 461 2 0.0043384
Prion 473 3 0.0063425 1583 7 0.0044220
Punctuated equilibrium 943 1 0.0010604 1265 0 0
Pythagoras' theorem * 688 1 0.0014535 1899 1 0.00052659
Quark 1112 5 0.0044964 2060 0 0
Royal Greenwich Observatory 235 3 0.012766 532 5 0.0093985
Royal Society 416 6 0.014423 869 2 0.0023015
Synchrotron 770 2 0.0025974 1590 2 0.0012579
Thyroid 583 4 0.0068611 1459 7 0.0047978
Vesalius, Andreas 930 2 0.0021505 1174 4 0.0034072
West Nile Virus 245 1 0.0040816 1320 5 0.0037879
Wolfram, Stephen 475 2 0.0042105 559 2 0.0035778
Woodward, Robert Burns 873 0 0 2320 3 0.0012931
Total 22733 123 45254 162
Mean 541.26 2.9286 0.0054106 1077.5 3.8571 0.0035798

* - Articles marked as good articles

  • Word counts were computed by pasting text from the Firefox browser into the Unix wc program. This gives a slight over-estimate because it counts anything surrounded by whitespace as a "word". Britannica counts were taken from Britannica Online. Wikipedia articles were from 14 December 2005 except where otherwise noted.
  • Tables of contents, external links, see also, and reference sections were excluded from word counts.
As a note of caution, since Nature said the lengths of articles they compared were roughly equal, the versions they compared must be different from those whose length we compare here (since our versions are now longer than the EB articles.). This isn't surprising considering the lead time needed to select the articles, send them out for review, gather the reviews, and compile and publish the results. - Nunh-huh 06:43, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
I find that a bit dubious. By that theory, we should be able to date the review by going back to the last time the articles were comparable to the EB articles (which presumably haven't changed much recently). However, I just checked the Vesalius, Andreas article (which is one of the egregious examples where WP is 10 times the word count of EB), and you have to go back to 2002 to get significantly shorter than it is now, which seems unlikely. I find it more likely that the editors simply tossed out any obvious stubs or near-stubs. —Steven G. Johnson 06:55, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
So something is amiss. I somehow doubt Nature compared a 62 word EB article on Robert Burns Woodward to his Wikipedia 2300 word article. (And found no significant omissions in EB!) - Nunh-huh 06:59, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
Oh @#$#@, no it's my fault. I miscounted the EB Vesalius article — it's one of the (very few) EB articles which is spread over multiple pages, and I only counted one page. Similarly with the Woodward article. I'll go back and recheck any others where the imbalance seems to be large. (Update: counts should be corrected now.) —Steven G. Johnson 07:02, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
If there winds up being a significant difference, then the explanation is most likely error or a difference in versions. Nature specifically states "All entries were chosen to be approximately the same length in both encyclopaedias. In a small number of cases some material, such as reference lists, was removed to make the lengths of the entries more similar." [1]. - Nunh-huh 07:24, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
Note that the references, external links, and "see also" sections were excluded from all of my counts. I still find discrepancies I can't explain. Our West Nile virus article, even one year ago, was 1108 words or 4.5 times the word count of the EB article. I've searched around EB, and I can't find any huge alternative article on this virus that they could have used instead. —Steven G. Johnson 07:31, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
Is there an alternative EB website? Are we counting the words in an EB "junior" site? Just a possibility. - Nunh-huh 08:08, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
According to their website (to which my university gives me access), I am searching the full EB. (They also have "student", "concise", and "elementary" versions of EB, but I'm not using those.) I'm not accusing Nature of dishonesty, but I admit I'm mystified. I wouldn't be surprised if they thought a factor of two was "comparable" length, but a factor of almost 5 seems like a lot. —Steven G. Johnson 08:14, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
I've emailed the news editor and asked if they could provide the exact article date/time versions that they sent to those 50 experts. That should be useful for figuring out if the errors have already been fixed, and for comparing the versions they sent and the soon-to-be more accurate ones. It's possible that they didn't think to check their versions, but they probably did. I'll pass on the reply when it comes. --Mr. Billion 23:09, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
No reply. Ah, well. We'll see. --Mr. Billion 19:32, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

From the editors (see supplementary Nature report above):

Each of the reporters that worked on the survey chose 10 to 15 scientific terms that were roughly in their scientific beat – the sorts of things we ourselves would check in an encyclopaedia. We had not looked at any of these entries in either encyclopaedia when we selected them. Then we weeded out the terms that did not have any entry in Britannica (they all appeared in Wikipedia), and any for which the entries were vastly different in length. Sometimes the lengths were balanced by amalgamating two or three Britannica entries into one coherent piece – for example, 'ethanol' was done this way. We felt this represented 'everything Britannica had to say on the subject' – at least, everything we could find by a quick search of Britannica online, exactly the way a user would approach

So, the criterion was not "vastly different" in length, which would allow e.g. a factor of two difference, and maybe even a factor of 5. —Steven G. Johnson 17:35, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Article status

None of the articles reviewed have featured article status, and none have undergone our internal peer review process. Two articles, Ethanol and Pythagorean theorem, have good article status with the latter being a former featured article (see here, though there is virtually no discussion there). violet/riga (t) 19:48, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Tagging all the Nature-reviewed articles with errors a bit of an overreaction?

Putting a "This article has been identified as possibly containing errors" tag on the front page of ALL articles identified by Nature seems a bit of an overreaction, particularly in the case of articles with one or two "errors". Also, given the lack of adequate information concerning the reviewing criteria, and, most importantly, WHICH REVISION OF EACH ARTICLE WAS REVIEWED, it sets up a bit of an unnecessary witchhunt situation.

  • The nature of the errors is not at all clear; according to the Nature report, Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia, the rest were factual errors, omissions or misleading statements -- it is extremely difficult to decide what might have been considered an error, even a simple typo could result in a "factual error".
  • Once again, the revision dates of the reviewed Wikipedia articles are not indicated; without this information, and considering the lead time of weeks even months for magazine articles, it is IMPOSSIBLE to determine whether the "errors" even exist anymore, unless an article has been entirely untouched for a very long time.
  • The conclusion, according to Nature, is that Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries, and the difference in accuracy was not particularly great

Common sense and the findings of Nature's investigation both say that the vast majority of Wikipedia articles will contain some type of error or omission, so why single out these articles? What is this questing for "experts" to validate the work here? (First, from discussion pages, it appears that numerous contributors possess significant practical expertise and academic credentials in many subject areas, so there is already...professional input. Second, the "experts" who "understand" esoteric stuff aren't necessarily the best people to explain 'em, for a number of obvious reasons, or do we want college professors to mark the work?) If Wikipedia is already pretty close to Britannica, why not just get on with things? A Nature tag on the Talk page should be sufficient in most if not all cases. --Tsavage 23:53, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Your reaction is an overreaction. =)
  1. The Nature editors have stated that they will provide us with a specific list of their reviewer comments (see top), at which point we can fix any problems and the warning tags will be removed. Tags for a couple of weeks won't hurt us; quite the opposite.
  2. As a purely public relations matter, a lot of people, including journalists, are visiting the articles mentioned in Nature. It will make a good impression to see that the articles already indicate our awareness of potential problems. A lack of any acknowledgement, on the other hand, will suggest that we can't respond quickly or that we are so clueless that we don't take Nature seriously. (The Talk page is effectively invisible to most readers.)
  3. Nature is one of the most prestigious scientific journals. We should take their criticism, even vague criticism, very seriously indeed, regardless of PR. Nor are we satisfied with "only" one or two errors, regardless of how we compare to Britannica.
  4. I think you're greatly mistaken if you think "experts" who "understand" stuff aren't vitally important in writing and vetting science articles. In my experience, in order to properly explain things at a simple level you have to understand them at a much deeper level or else you will probably make simplifications that are incorrect.
—Steven G. Johnson 06:52, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
Well, I find your reaction to my reaction to "our" reaction, an overreaction... I'm merely contributing my input around the topic.
  • I'm here and contributing largely because this is an open content-licensed project that boldly states on its front page: "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." You don't even have to register to contribute. That pretty clearly sets up the premise for the whole project. Where do designated experts providing broad critical comments come into the mechanics of the thing, beyond as a matter of peripheral interest?
  • I am part of the "we" you refer to, but so is, basically, anyone and everyone. That's Wikipedia. It is all of us... If we/you/they/anyone can view Wikipedia, they can edit it, and therefore they are the "we". So, who are "we" doing PR for? Who are we trying to prove what to?
  • The Nature article is interesting, and great for Wikipedia (and bad for Britannica), but it's also more of a catchy news piece than anything "scientific". Nature publishes "peer-reviewed scientific papers", and it has an in-house-written news section; this report is part of the latter. Asking for detailed comment from people recognized as experts in whatever field is a standard journalistic approach. It is not "peer-review" in a rigorous scientific, experimental sense, more like "book review". It is an interesting editorial gambit that can generate lots of press... So, this We should take their criticism, even vague criticism, very seriously indeed is insipid and wanting in pride and backbone (IMHO, of course).
  • Yes, of course the best, most elegantly simple explanations tend to come from people who know what they're talking about. But communicating ideas and being expert in working with them are two different things. Every brilliant researcher and theoretician would not make a great teacher. Every brilliant teacher is not a brilliant researcher or theoretician, that is, will not fully understand all of the concepts involved in what he teaches. It takes all types to communicate an idea widely... Giving "all types" the chance is what Wikipedia to me is about. Bowing down to...academia and the generic concept of "experts" is different from respecting those with knowledge who wish to contribute...
I addressed the "we", you addressed me personally. That's my reaction to you trying to make me into your "we"... :) --Tsavage 17:52, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Tagging articles on the basis of this study seems wholly an overreaction. The table above shows that just about every article they looked at contained some error both in wiki and in EB. So statistically that implies exactly the same tag ought to be applied to every single article in wiki, since they also likely contain the same rate of unidentified errors. So the tags really aren't going to help wiki content. Whether they help wiki PR is another debateable point. Especially tagging these without a better idea of exactly what the problem might be smacks of oversensitivity to fair comment. Sandpiper 02:01, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Revision progress

I've posted messages on the talk pages of each article studied, listing what's wrong. -- user:zanimum

Please list corrections (with dates and links) in a neutral fashion at: Wikipedia:External peer review/Nature December 2005/Errors. —Steven G. Johnson 19:47, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Britannica's Reply

Britannica has replied to Nature's article and claim the nature article was itself innacurate in a number of ways. It would probably be good for Wikipedians to check the sources Brittanica gives and note needed changes in our articles.

[edit] Nature's Response

Nature has now issued comments on Britannica's rebuttal, and stands by its original article. [2]

Jim Giles made a presentation at Wikimania on 2006-08-04.

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