The Tao of Searching

If you are going to cram for the final, Here's a few hints,

2007-05-07T22:17:00.000-06:00

OK, the steps to pass a final and get a good grade in a class are:

Attend all your classes,
Do all your assignments on time,
Take good notes and study them,
Complete all reading assignments,
Ask the professor for help with anything you don't understand,

If you have done these things these next few weeks are not going to be overly stressful. However, there may be a few of you who did not make it to class as often as you could have, your notes don't really make a lot of sense and are spotty, your dog is at the vet from ink and paper poisoning, and your text book makes a cracking sound when you open it. Tomorrow is your final. You are going to have to cram.

Again this is not about how to learn anything or to do well in a class. This is about how to do what you can to pass your final.

First look through your notes and see if there is anything underlined or that has stars or arrows next to it that you may have put their to remind you that it was important. If it is a word or a phrase look in a high quality dictionary, the glossary in your text book, adn the index in your text book and read up on the note,
Next most text books start with an introduction that summarizes what the chapter is about and ends with a conclusion that does the same thing. Go through your text and read the first and last paragraph or section for each chapter,
Most quality text books do not add images or charts arbitrarily, but use them to emphasize important points. As you go through the chapters look at the images and charts and study the captions, if necessary read some of the text until you understand the point they are trying to make,
If your text has a glossary study that next, you can record your reading and listen to it the next day before class if you have time,
If it is an essay final after completing the steps above, look up your topic in a good encyclopedia like Britannica, thoroughly learn the entry about President Lincoln or the Cold War or whatever your topic is, you can also record this to listen to before class, there are few if any professors that will expect you to know more than what is written in Britannica unless it is a very specific or arcane topic, if you can write the equivalent of an encyclopedia entry for an essay exam, you will most likely get a decent grade,

For those of you that have book reports due the next day on 600+ page books that you have not read and there are no cliff notes you may still have a chance.

Again Read the first and last paragraph of each chapter,
Read any image captions,
Look in article databases for other reviews of the book, You must not copy these reviews but they can guide you to the major themes of a book,

Get some sleep, eat some healthy food and get some exercise like a relaxing walk. Studies have shown that material reviewed just prior to sleep is often transfered to long term memory and processed by the brain while you sleep. Exercise and healthy foods also increase brain power. Following these steps may make the information you need accessible during the exam the next day.

I make no promises about any of this working. The only way to be sure is to do the work when you are supposed to as first mentioned in this post. However, if you have to cram this systematic approach may be your best hope.

Good Luck

Skewed Survey's: or Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

2007-04-23T22:38:00.000-06:00

MSNBC has put up a web page entitled "About our Live Votes and surveys: How 1,000 people can be more representative than 200,000"
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3704453/

This is an important addition to the discussion about information literacy. It is a concise and informative article about how polls, surveys, and online votes can differ greatly in results even on the same topic and with the same questions. It is also gratifying to see a major media outlet not only to be so circumspect about how they present information, but to also be open about it with the public. Some of the more interesting statements include:

One week in the middle of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, more than 200,000 people took part in an MSNBC Live Vote that asked whether President Clinton should leave office. Seventy-three percent said yes. That same week, an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll found that only 34 percent of about 2,000 people who were surveyed thought so.

To explain the vast gap in the numbers in this and other similar cases, it is necessary to look at the difference in the two kinds of surveys.

While a poll of 100 people will be more accurate than a poll of 10, studies have shown that accuracy begins to improve less at about 500 people and increases only a minor amount beyond 1,000 people.

Random selection of those polled is necessary to ensure a broad representation of the population at large.

To begin with, the people who respond choose to do so — they are not randomly selected and asked to participate, but instead make the choice to read a story about a certain topic and then vote on a related question. There is thus no guarantee that the votes would reflect anything close to a statistical sample...

This is a good and brief explanation about statistical sampling and reliability that I think would be useful for everybody to review. It is a good reminder of things we tend to forget. To many of us these may seem obvious, however it is easy when reading an article, book or web site for us to just accept the statistics offered without considering the way they were collected and the context in which they are delivered. With plethora of information providers both ethical and less ethical it is now more important than ever to check the sources and verify information with separate and independent resources.

Ten Hacks to Raise Your Research Paper Grade

2007-03-15T23:56:00.000-06:00

1. What's Your question?
The most important step you make is defining what you are trying to find out, or in other words what question will your research answer. This is called Task Definition. An example of poor Task Definition would be "I need some information on drugs". The question needs to be more specific to focus your research and keep it manageable. An example of good Task Definition would be "What are the health risks of steroid use by high school athletes?" It is clear what question you are going to answer and this will help make it clear what sources you need to get. Next take the main concepts of your question and use them to make a list of keywords for your searches.

health risks or: side effects, dangers, complications, consequences
steroids or: performance enhancing drugs, illegal drugs, banned substances
high school athletes or: amateur athletes, young athletes, school sports, football, basketball

2. Favorite Article,
Once you find some sources, you can take the best source and search the library catalog, article databases and Google Scholar for other sources by the same author. You can also look at the bibliography or sources cited and use some of the sources the author used.

3. Do not cite encyclopedias,
As Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia said "For God sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia,". Encyclopedias are useful as a general guide to familiarize yourself with a topic but it is not a research destination. You can familiarize yourself with anew topic, and use the bibliography and look for other sources by the article's author but do not use it as a source. If you do use an encyclopedia use the Encyclopedia Brittanica on Steen library's web site. It is a more authoritative source than Wikipedia which has at least a 42% error rate. To get an idea of the problems Wikipedia is facing go to their "Community Portal and look at their Help section. It lists thousands of errors, corrections and changes that Wikepedia community itself knows needs to be addressed.

5. Specialized Encyclopedias,
Sometimes you can use a specialized encyclopedia as a source. Some examples would be the Encyclopedia of New Media: An Essential Reference to Communication and Technology, or Environment Encyclopedia and Directory 2007, these are sometimes the best and most efficient sources for Specialized information.

6. Gov. Docs.,
Government Documents are a goldmine of information. Unfortunately finding anything in them and then accessing them can be as hard as mining for gold. However, if you locate a government document in the library catalog that is relevant, then ask a librarian to help you locate the document. Quote a piece of it in your paper and cite it correctly. You will have to use the style manual to find out how. Online citation web sites for the most part do not cover such esoteric sources. A correctly cited quote from a piece of government microfiche makes any bibliography look good. It also makes the researcher appear to have left no stone unturned.

7. Primary Sources, including interviews, personal conversations, correspondence and emails,
Primary sources are an excellent way to improve your bibliography and your grade. It is getting the information straight from the horse's mouth. Often we think of primary sources as old documents or diaries in the archives, but depending on your topic many things can be considered a primary source. If you are writing about the Great Depression or WWII and you talk with an older relative about their experiences and memories during those events, that conversation is a primary source. If you quote and then cite the conversation correctly, it shows initiative and attention to detail. If you have an email or snail mail correspondence with a witness or participant in an event, the originator of an idea, or the author of the book you are reviewing, those are also considered primary sources. However, you will have to check your style manual and cite it correctly or you will loose all your brownie points.

8. Spell Check Grammar Check, even if you have to cut and paste from different program,
Use the spell checker and grammar checker in Word or some other program. There is no point in losing points for something the computer can do for you. If these checkers are not turned on you can usually activate them with an option under the Tools menu.

9. Let your Mac, or MS Word or Adobe PDF read your paper to you,
Avoid typos and grammatical mistakes by listening to your writing reported in Lifehacker Listen to your writing. That's right you can get your computer to read your paper back to you. This is extremely helpful because after you have proofread a paper several times you start seeing things that aren't there. Often you mind will fill in a word that you meant to include but you never typed. It also helps to identify awkward phrases and wording. The links above can show how it is done.

10. Visit the AARC Writing Desk
Finally visit the AARC writing desk. You can always use a fresh set of eyes to look over your paper. Especially if those eyes have a brain behind them that got an "A" in English. The desk is free, you don't need an appointment, and all it can do is improve your grade. Take the time, make the time, and take your draft to the writing desk.

Putting off doing the work till the night before or even a couple of days before the deadline does not leave much of a chance of any of these suggestions making a difference. Your best options in that case are to ask for more time, ask a librarian for help, and visit the AARC desk. Obviously there is more to writing a research paper than these ten hacks. However, these hacks can improve your grade if you have not neglected the other work.

They day the Nacogdoches Rollergirls Made Hisory

2007-02-27T22:57:00.000-06:00

I know this is off topic but it is just too awesome too pass up. The Rollerderby bout was awesome last night, maybe even turbo cool. Madame Furrie from the Iron Maidens in the NRG has a great post with some good comments at her blog "Strange Fruit" I'll quote from her blog because she is as great a writer as she is a skater.

But back to NRG. The Iron Maidens and the Brick Street Brawlers hit the rink raring to go. We basically skated as fast as we could and hit harder than we ever had before for the first five minutes. And then - exhaustion. .... Miss Glad Ass suffered a major injury in the first five minutes and was out for the rest of the bout. Today, we found out it was a broken collar bone.

... those last two minutes were brutal! Goody Nuff and Bad Apple were our last two jammers. The Maidens were ahead, but not by much, and the Brawlers weren't giving up without a fight. And what a fight it was! An all out kamikaze mission on quads and I'm surprised we didn't have more broken bones. But when the buzzer sounded and the smoke cleared, the final score was Brick Street Brawlers - 94; Iron Maidens - 107.

I am chalking last night up as a success, NRG's finest yet. And trust me - they are only going to keep getting better.

Love, Madame Furie

It was a blast we completely sold out of tickets

So what is the point with Wikipedia and Britannica?

2007-01-19T15:53:00.000-06:00

In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education Jimmy Wales "founder" of Wikipedia warned students about Wikipedia. He goes on to say "For God sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia,".

When deciding to use Wikipedia or Britannica the first question is which can you get to? If I am at work at the library I will use Britannica. However if I am off campus and have to go through some kind of proxy verification or other hassle I will use Wikipedia. I would not use the free version of Britannica because of the excessive amount of advertising and the information provided is barely as much as you would find in a good biographical dictionary.

The problem is that this is not why I posted on Tuesday, December 5, 2006 The Tao of Searching: Wikipedia Britannica and missing the point. Or why even the Journal Nature missed the point. The point is: Encyclopedias are not a research destination. Encyclopedias are a starting point or a roadmap for research. Over the last few years web gurus have been using the term sticky (see Make Things Sticky) to describe a good web site. They don’t want users to just visit a page and then leave the site. They want them stay on the site. One problem with Wikipedia and Britannica is that they have great designers that adopted this philosophy. They too offer up more and more choices and links to keep the user on the site. The problem is when you are doing research you do not want to get stuck in an encyclopedia.

At Cornell University they put together a brief introduction on how to do research called “The Seven Steps of the Research Process”. Step two is: Look up your keywords in the indexes to subject encyclopedias. Read articles in these encyclopedias to set the context for your research. Note any relevant items in the bibliographies at the end of the encyclopedia articles.

This is how to use encyclopedias. If you will notice they specifically mentioned “subject encyclopedias”. Subject encyclopedias focus on one discipline or area of knowledge and therefore usually will cover a topic to a greater depth than a regular encyclopedia. It is also likely to be more authoritative in that particular field than a general encyclopedia. The quick and dirty way to find them at the library, is to go to the catalog and do a keyword search for “encyclopedia psychology” (or geology, religion or whatever your topic is). Then look for books with the word encyclopedia and your subject in the title Once you have a couple of call numbers, go to that section of the library and look at the encyclopedias you picked, also look at the books nearby. They will be on the same topic and there may be another book that will work better for you. Or you could just ASK A LIBRARIAN.

If you are on the web you can go to Google and type in “encyclopedia philosophy” (or whatever your topic is) and you should get a lot of results. When looking at the results you will want to look at the URL to see if it is a .com .org or an .edu site. A .com will probably be trying to sell you something. You will also want to read the description. Then visit a few of the sites and see which ones will work best for you. Better yet would be to go to The Open Directory Project (ODP) and type in encyclopedia and look at their collection. Or you could just ASK A LIBRARIAN.

Ultimately the only books that people claim inerrant are the Qur'an, Bible, and The Book of Mormon. Therefore, we may assume that everything else may have some errors and problems. Britannica has fewer errors by a wide margin. It is written and edited to professional academic standards, and it has years of experience in publishing encyclopedias. Unfortunately only a small portion is free, unless you have access through an institution like a library. This may involve proxy access or passwords or IP verification that may not work so well at your location or with your device. Of course you can buy access but an experienced researcher can probably find the equivalent amount and quality of information they need using the web, maybe even through Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is accessible from almost any type of web access device. It is free and is easy to use, and you can get sucked into editing entries on some of your favorite topics. It is surprising how enjoyable it is to contribute to or edit Wikipedia. On the downside any idiot like me can contribute or edit Wikipedia. It does have an unacceptable number of errors to be considered authoritative or equivalent to Britannica.

Despite the characteristics described here, the point again is that “the encyclopedia is not a research destination. Encyclopedias are a starting point or a roadmap for research.” It’s the things you discover along the way, the sense of accomplishment for finishing an assignment, or mastering a new area of knowledge, that is the destination.

Next maybe we will talk about how to pick out a book and then maybe how to evaluate information on web sites.

R Philip Reynolds

A Little More Wikipedia before we discuss research uses

2007-01-09T13:39:00.000-06:00

From Shout Blog

Mediocre Top Ten List

I was reading an interesting bit in Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail about how top 10 lists of things that are spread thinly across multiple categories tend to be banal. His primary example is that of top 10 lists of artists from all genres. ... such a list–it’s simply a jumble of popular artists....

... I was reminded of a top 10 contest two my friends and I played ... in college. We had decided to create a list of the best songs of all time. We would each come up with 10 songs that we felt would make the list, and we would go down the line and eliminate songs from each others’ lists until we only had 10 left–presumably, the 10 best.

We were really excited, as if the final list would be a miracle list straight from the heavens.

We quickly went to the task of whittling down the 3 lists. One person would exclaim, “No way that song would ever be on my list. That’s out!” And thus, this went on ....

But, as the number of songs dwindled, we began to notice something. .... It started to look like a Billboard music chart.

We were horrified. .... Our tastes are eclectic and niche. The last thing we wanted was a final list that mirrored the pop charts.

The real problem underlying it all was that our tastes were different enough to cause a “graying” of the final list. Combining our tastes into one list resulted in a bland popular songs list, without any artists that delved deeply into a genre...."

I think this can be related to what Alexis De Tocqueville referred to as "The tyranny of the majority." In chpts. 15 and 16 "Democracy in America." This rule would also come into effect in Wikipedia where the majority opinion as opposed to objective research must ultimately rule. However, eventually it became the tyranny of the unemployed and teenagers with a lot of time on their hands, who could follow entries and change them immediately after someone made a correction. One of the founders Sanders describes things this way. "It's a relatively few, difficult to deal with people that cause the problems, and once a quorum of such people were at work on the Wikipedia system," . In chpt. 16 De Tocqueville states "When the central government which represents that majority has issued a decree, it must entrust the execution of its will to agents over whom it frequently has no control and whom it cannot perpetually direct. The townships, municipal bodies, and counties form so many concealed breakwaters, which check or part the tide of popular determination." Unfortunately in Wikipedia these checks come in the form of uninformed individuals, special interest groups, or incompetents. Sanders comments on the poor writing exhibited in some of the articles. "It's really that the skills to marshal an argument, and represent the facts correctly are all skills encouraged by a solid liberal arts education. It's a problem associated more with a lack of training in the liberal arts."

In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education Jimmy Wales "founder" of Wikipedia warned students not to refer to Wikipedia, he goes on to say "For God sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia,"

Ultimately web sites reflect the organization or entity that builds them. Wikipedia represents a wide swath of western democracy or the current western civilization's "hive mind" clearly and effectively. As such it is more a symptom of our culture especially the United States for the ages 14 - 44, than a simple problem of a few people writing some inaccurate information. That is why the debate is so heated. An indictment on Wikipedia is ultimately an indictment of "We the People" and an indictment on the entire Web 2.0 concept and the "hive mind". Unfortunately the "People" that choose to participate in Wikipedia appear to often be ill informed, biased and able to shout louder (post more often) than the more informed and moderate voices in our society, or in the Wikipedia project.

R Philip Reynolds

The greatest crisis facing us...

2006-12-09T12:28:00.000-06:00

Hi, everyone :),

I am going to postpone the second half of the encyclopedia thing for a groundbreaking speech I read.

"The greatest crisis facing us is not Russia, not the Atom Bomb, not corruption in government, not encroaching hunger, nor the morals of the young. It is a crisis in the organization and accessibility of human knowledge. We own an enormous "encyclopedia" - which isn't even arranged alphabetically. Our "file cards" are spilled on the floor, nor were they ever in order. The answers we want mat be buried somewhere in the heap, but it might take a lifetime to locate two already known facts, place them side by side and derive a third fact, the one we urgently need.
Call it the crisis of the Librarian.
We need a new "specialist" who is not a specialist, but a synthesist. (n) We need a new science to be a perfect secretary to all other sciences."

Who wrote this? David Lynch? Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin?
Nope

Robert A Heinlein in 1950 in a piece originally called "Where To?". In this piece Heinlein makes several predictions or extrapolations about the future. It was repeated as "Pandora's Box" in the book The Worlds of Robert A Heinlein published by Ace Books, New York in 1962. In the 1962 version after twelve years of thought and history had gone by he amended some of his predictions but this one remained the same. Then in 1980 it was again reprinted by Ace Books in Expanded Universe Robert A. Heinlein as "Where To?" (pp 317-371). He again had the opportunity after thirty years of reflection and history to revise his statements. Many of them were changed but this one was not. In his list of the forerunners of these "synthesists" that he makes in 1965 he mentions several job titles but does not include librarian as one of them.

In Snow Crash by Neal Stevenson, Bantam Books Paperback 1993 (p107) we read:

"The Librarian daemon looks like a pleasant, fiftyish,
silverhaired, bearded man with bright blue eyes, wearing
a V-neck sweater over a work shirt, with a coarsely
woven, tweedy-looking wool tie. The tie is loosened,
the sleeves pushed up. Even though he’s just a piece
of software, he has reason to be cheerful; he can move
through the nearly infinite stacks of information in the
Library with the agility of a spider dancing across a
vast web of cross references"

The "librarian is a piece of software that programs itself.
In her article I Librarian Hilda Kruger described "Having an agent methodically crawling the Web, gathering the information you’ve specified, is a bit like having a full-time reference librarian residing in your PC."
(INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES | SEPTEMBER 2005 p124).
She talks about these Intelligent Software Agents (ISA) burrowing into our lives but we are way beyond that I have two different types of agents downloaded as add ons to my FireFox browser.

One is "Clearforest Gnosis" http://sws.clearforest.com/Blog/?page_id=32 its function is to:

ClearForest Gnosis uses advanced natural language processing techniques and ClearForests’s Semantic Web Service (SWS) to
extract meaning from the content of any web page.

With a single click, Gnosis will identify the people, companies, organizations, geographies and products on the page you are viewing. Using the built-in navigation sidebar you can gain immediate understanding of the page’s contents.

The other is "read4me" XUL http://read4me.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

"Client front end to read4me server. read4me is a Python feed-reading web service. It reads RSS or atom feeds and, using Bayesian statistics, reports how much you will like the articles. This project includes a server and a Firefox extension client."

Then I organize it all with Zotero

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources:

- Automatic capture of citation information from web pages

- Storage of PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages

- Flexible notetaking with autosave

- Fast, as-you-type search through your materials

- Playlist-like library organization, including saved searches (smart collections) and tags

- Platform for new forms of digital research that can be extended with other web tools and services

- Formatted citation export (style list to grow rapidly)"

In her abstract Kruger says "One of the main concerns of this paper is the continued relevance of information professionals as infomediaries in our future society." Maybe it has already gone from continued relevance to no relevance? Out of all of these books and articles being written there is a way forward offered in "Snow Crash" The Librarian states:

"I was not coded by a professional hacker, per se, but by a researcher at the Library of Congress who taught himself how to code. He devoted himself to sifting through vast amounts of irrelevant detail in order to find significant gems of information."

The hero of the story "Hiro Protaganist" replies "So he was kind of a meta-librarian." Is this our path? most of these projects including the two browser add ons I described are either open source or accept help from others in their development. The whole point behind Web 2.0 and Opensource software and publishing, is group participation. Do we follow their lead? It appears that the direction our profession has been to try and impose upon the web and its users, meta-data and proprietary databases and it was the wrong direction. Maybe it is time for a radical new direction. Maybe it is time for meta-librarians as programmers? If we can't take the lead in these new projects maybe we can at least make a valuable contribution.

Lets talk it over and I will make a list of new job duties for the meta-librarian and get back to that encyclopedia mess.

R Philip Reynolds

Wikipedia Britannica and missing the point

2006-12-05T22:27:00.000-06:00

In the Academic Journal "Nature" the following article appeared:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html

Nature 438, 900-901 (15 December 2005) doi:10.1038/438900a

Special Report Internet encyclopaedias go head to head

In the article Nature makes some startling claims based on "research " it had done. The most polemic of these claims included statements such as:

"However, an expert-led investigation carried out by Nature — the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica's coverage of science....The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three."

"Yet Nature's investigation suggests that Britannica's advantage may not be great, at least when it comes to science entries. In the study, entries were chosen from the websites of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica on a broad range of scientific disciplines and sent to a relevant expert for peer review....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."

Michael Twindale was quoted as saying:

"People will find it shocking to see how many errors there are in Britannica," Twidale adds. "Print encyclopaedias are often set up as the gold standards of information quality against which the failings of faster or cheaper resources can be compared. These findings remind us that we have an 18-carat standard, not a 24-carat one."

Britannica of course responded to these assertions in vehement Response Called "Fatally Flawed"
http://corporate.britannica.com/britannica_nature_response.pdf

In its response Britannica cited several points that it took issue with in the article.

"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."

"Nature’s research was invalid. 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. Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannica were not inaccuracies at all, and a number of the articles Nature examined were not even in the Encyclopædia Britannica. The study was so poorly carried out and its findings so error-laden that it was completely without merit. We have produced this document to set the record straight, to reassure Britannica’s readers about the quality of our content, and to urge that Nature issue a full and public retraction of the article."

"Anyone who read the article with even a modicum of care would have noticed a discrepancy
between the headline and the data themselves. While the heading proclaimed that “Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries,” the numbers buried deep in the body of the article said precisely the opposite: Wikipedia in fact had a third more inaccuracies than Britannica. (As we demonstrate below, Nature’s research grossly exaggerated Britannica’s inaccuracies, so we cite this figure only to point out the slanted way in which the numbers were presented.)"

"Nature reviewed text that was not even from the Encyclopædia Britannica. Several of the articles
Nature sent its reviewers were not from our core encyclopedia, and in one case it was not from
any Britannica publication at all."

"One Nature reviewer was sent only the 350-word introduction to Encyclopædia Britannica’s
6,000-word article on lipids. For Nature to have represented Britannica’s extensive coverage of
the subject with this short squib was absurd, and it invalidated the findings of omissions
alleged by the reviewer, since those matters were covered in sections of the article he or she
never saw.
Other reviewers were sent only sections taken from longer articles. For example, what the
Nature editors referred to as Britannica’s “articles” on “kin selection” and “punctuated equilibrium”
are actually separate sections of our article on the theory of evolution, written by one of
the foremost experts on evolution in the world. What they claimed to be an “article” on fieldeffect transistors was actually only one section of our article on integrated circuits. For Nature to have excerpted our articles in this way was irresponsible."

Britannica goes on to further attack the study's methodology and follows it with a 13 page appendix describing the errors made by the unnamed experts with unverified facts.

In Nature's reportedly point by point three page rebuttal to Britannica's twenty page statement.
http://www.nature.com/nature/britannica/eb_advert_response_final.pdf

Nature starts out with the tone of a rebuttal but the content essentially agrees with Britannica's accusations. Nature stated that it sent "numerical" information and "some samples of errors." Britannica then asked for the study's methodology, all of the errors and the reviewers reports. Nature sent the information and put it on its web sight but refused to send the reviewers comments because"We asked reviewers whether they wished to have their name attached to their reviews, but almost all declined." Apparently Nature's experts were not prepared to stake their reputation on, or even claim the assertions they made.

Nature asserts that all of the information given to reviewers was from Britannica. This assertion however looses its efficacy because the sentence that immediately follows the claim states "This was deliberate: the aim of our story, as we made clear, was to compare the online material available from Britannica and Wikipedia."

Nature then states that the article title was not misleading. That the "The standfirst to the story read “Jimmy Wales’ Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries, a Nature investigation finds.”

They then cite the 4 Wikipedia errors to 3 Britannica errors per article as proof that they come close. They completely fail to mention the 162 Wikipedia errors to the 123 Britannica errors described in the original article, they do mention that Britannica address almost half of the 123 errors in its response, which would lower the number of their errors and increase the ratio of errors in Wikipedia to Britannica. How are we supposed to compare these numbers? It sounds like both sides are playing games or that Nature's methodology was poor in that they had no consistent or meaningful way to record and report their metrics in the context of the comparisons.

The one statement that comes across as a bald faced lie is when Nature says,

"Another part of Britannica’s criticism concerns the fact that we provided material
from other Britannica publications, such as the Britannica Book of the Year. This
was deliberate: the aim of our story, as we made clear, was to compare the online
material available from Britannica and Wikipedia."

This is laughable The article repeatedly fails to address the web issue and never mentions the Britannica web site.

"Internet encyclopaedias go head to head"

They don not say Wikipedia's site goes against Britannica's site or even Britannica.com.

Later they ask "...if Wikipedia is as accurate as established sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica?" By established sources they seem to be referring to"...the oldest continuously published reference work in the English language."(encyclopedia Britannica) Not to a web site that is a few years old. In fact they almost seem to go out of their way to say just "Britannica" and never say Britannica's web site , or Britannica's publications. The Nature rebuttal and article also lack any kind of notation. Britannica on the other hand has a set of 10 extensive footnotes on the first eight pages of its response. Its bibliographies in its encyclopedia provide further authoritative resources not to mention things written by the article contributers. I wonder if Nature's 'study' would have been different if they would have had to produce a bibliography of supporting sources or even had to identify their contributers? Nature also failed to mention whether they used the fee based content available through the Britannica site and many libraries or just the free services.

Britannica and Nature and the reviewers and editors all agreed on one thing. "Reviewers told the journal that many of the Wikipedia articles were “poorly structured and confusing.” "Former Britannica editor Robert McHenry declared one Wikipedia entry — on US founding father Alexander Hamilton — as "what might be expected of a high-school student".

So what does this all mean? Can I use Wikipedia or Britannica? Which one should I choose? As my title indicates both seem to miss the point. Each fail to adequately identify their user groups habits or needs for their products, or their products' role in the research process. They miss the point and argue about mostly petty mistakes. The only books I have ever heard called perfect are the Quran, Bible and Book of Mormon.

Interestingly enough the next year one of Wikipedias founders announced the creation of a wikipedia rival.
Wikipedia founder plans rival
By Richard Waters in San Francisco
Published: October 16 2006 21:08 Last updated: October 16 2006 21:08

"The latest venture from Larry Sanger, who helped create Wikipedia in 2001,
is intended to bring more order to this creative chaos by drawing on traditional
measures of authority. Though still open to submissions from anyone, the power
to authorise articles will be given to editors who can prove their expertise, as
well as a group of volunteer “constables”, charged with keeping the peace
between warring interests.
Accusing Wikipedia of failing to control its writers and editors, he said: “The latest articles don't represent a consensus view – they tend to become what the most persistent ‘posters’ say.”

Next time we will look at encyclopedias and wikipedia and see what their role is in the research process and when and how they should be used.

Twisted Sage
Forever learning but never coming to a knowledge of the truth.

The Register
Nature mag cooked Wikipedia study

The Register
Wikipedia science 31% more cronky than Britannica's