Internet encyclopaedias go head to head

>Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries, a Nature investigation finds. https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a (2005) FWIW, Perplexity Pro now provides numerous primary source references/citations for its answers.

> The teacher instead should be directing the children to print or digitized encyclopedias Any data source you encounter needs to be validated. Wikipedia is a fine source for lots of types of data, traditional encyclopedias aren’t known to be any more accurate. The reality is you have to think about the importance of the information you’re looking up, but most people shouldn’t be referring to primary sources as they are much harder to validate than secondary sources. “Wikipedia has a similar number of errors to professional and peer-reviewed sources” — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6889752/ Another source: https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a

Maybe I need to add a section (in bold, flashing red text?) reiterating that you need to read the citations and not rely on the content? This recent example is awful, yes, but relied heavily on a Wikipedia project which has less strict referencing rules, and was consumed by people who didn't take the time to fact-check — we're about on par with Encyclopedia Britannica (ref: https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a)

This has not been true since at least 2005: https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a Now someone will say Nature is unreliable and we need to wait for findings to replicated in more applicable domain-specific journals…

As a someone who was born before the internet became popular, I used to love paging through paper encyclopedias. That said... https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a

Of course Wikipedia has some unique problems due to its fundamental structure, but on the whole it is roughly as accurate as other Encyclopedias [1]. But not every study agrees [2]. See also [3]. It seems to be also be field dependent, and I have to say that personally, as a mathematician, I have never seen anything wrong in any article about mathematics. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a [2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249362832_Compariso... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia