supplementaryinformationtoaccompanynaturenewsarticle.docVIP

Supplementary information to accompany Nature news article “Internet encyclopaedias go head to head (Nature 438, 900-901; 2005) 22 December 2005 Here is more detailed information about how our survey was carried out and the errors that were identified. This includes a description of how the peer review worked, some of the specific questions that have been put to us, and a full list of all the errors identified, for both Encyclopaedia Britannica and Wikipedia. The reviewers originally participated under condition of anonymity, but a few have subsequently agreed to being identified, and we have added their identities alongside their comments below. No test is perfect and we acknowledge that any of our reviewers could themselves have made occasional errors. But by choosing reviewers who were highly qualified in the specific area described by each entry, we aimed to subject the encyclopaedia entries to the fairest and most stringent test that we could. We would like to thank all of our reviewers for their contribution. HOW THE PEER REVIEW WORKED We chose fifty entries from the websites of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica on subjects that represented a broad range of scientific disciplines. Only entries that were approximately the same length in both encyclopaedias were selected. In a small number of cases some material, such as reference lists, was removed to bring the length of the entries closer together. Each pair of entries was sent to a relevant expert for peer review. The reviewers, who were not told which article came from which encyclopaedia, were asked to look for three types of inaccuracy: factual errors, critical omissions and misleading statements. 42 useable reviews were returned. The reviews were then examined by Natures news team and the total number of errors estimated for each article. In doing so, we sometimes disregarded items that our reviewers had identified as errors or critical omissions. In particular, as we were interested