

Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia - edwardy20
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Errors_in_the_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica_that_have_been_corrected_in_Wikipedia

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twelvechairs
I'm sure there must be an equal and inverse list for errors in Wikipedia that
are correct in Britannica, and lets not even get started on things explained
in Britannica with clarity and brevity where Wikipedia doodles on minutiae.

Seriously - I'm not quite sure what the point of this is, other than as a
Wikipedia PR exercise.

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bunderbunder
And let's not forget that recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education
where Wikipedians were obstinately refusing to allow an authority on the
subject to fix some errors in an article on the Haymarket Affair, or even to
take his input on how the article should be fixed.

Their official position on the subject was, as I remember, to point out that
Wikipedia articles aren't meant to represent the facts; they're meant to
represent popular conceptions. (Perhaps that's why their articles on health
topics tend to be so bad about parroting pseudoscientific hogwash?)

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gee_totes
Yup, the standard for inclusion on Wikipedia is "Verifiability, Not Truth",
which I feel is a sad reflection on our post-modern age.

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bunderbunder
It's funny, a long time ago the prevailing definition of knowledge among
philosophers was "justified _true_ belief". Then Gettier came along in the 60s
and rained on everyone's parade, and it became clear that those three criteria
were not sufficient.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia's official position is, in essence, that you only need to
have two of them to have knowledge. Which is ironically something of a step
back to the way scholars were doing it in the Middle Ages.

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ComputerGuru
You know, that's a ridiculously short list. I was honestly expecting something
much, much longer for a crowdsourced errata-discovery spanning 32 volumes.
Kudos to Encyclopedia Britannica on doing a good job.

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CJefferson
I know, it's impressive.

I am sure I, like many people, have found dozens of errors in Wikipedia. I
used to try to correct them, but gave up when my changes would get reverted,
even with references.

