Wikipedia nearly as good as Encyclopedia Britannica?

Wikipedia is about as good a source of accurate information as Britannica, the standard-bearer of facts about the world around us, according to a study published this week in the journal Nature.

For its study, Nature chose articles from both sites in a wide range of topics and sent them to what it called "relevant" field experts for peer review. The experts then compared the competing articles--one from each site on a given topic--side by side, but were not told which article came from which site. Nature got back 42 usable reviews from its field of experts.

In the end, the journal found just eight serious errors, such as general misunderstandings of vital concepts, in the articles. Of those, four came from each site. They did, however, discover a series of factual errors, omissions or misleading statements. All told, Wikipedia had 162 such problems, while Britannica had 123.

Wikipedia will always have a certain amount of errors. When you are building and managing a free encyclopeia built up by volunteer researchers from all over the internet, you are bound to get some innaccuracies. But, they are small in numbers and the self correcting system is solid.

I believe that Wikipedia's time has come. Everyone should check it out.