Ah, Wikipedia

You know when some folks complain that Wikipedia has rubbish in it and can be factually incorrect, and you correct them by pointing out that Wikipedia has been proven to be overall more accurate than the Encyclopaedia Britannica?

Just don't show them this page (luckily it's been corrected, which is also a bit of a pity), on the year 1753:

(Thanks Darren!)

Comments

[bob]

Actually, if you read the first article, the study showed that Wikipedia was almost as accurate as Encyclopaedia Britannica with, on average, nearly one more mistake per article. That means Wikipedia had almost a third more mistakes. (The fact that Wikipedia has corrected some of those mistakes does not make it more accurate overall than Britannica, as new mistakes get introduced all the time.)
Perhaps I've picked the wrong topics to look to Wikipedia for information, but my own attempts to use it as a source for the most simple, basic facts in research have caused so many problems (when many of those simple facts turned out to be incorrect), that I no longer use it for anything more important than episode listings for television shows. I don't dare use Britannica either, if they aren't that much better, though I do wonder at the methodology of the study. The problem with Wikipedia is that the focus of the articles matches where the popular interests are- so there are long articles on anime, pornstars, television and contemporary movies, but often very sparse and factually questionable entries on, well, most everything else. So I wonder, in the study, if all the flawlessly researched information on Pamela Anderson, for example, averaged out some of the errors in their very poorly written historical entries?

[Tr00jg]

I love these things in Wikipedia (especially if its obivous). I once stumbled upon Jetlag. One of the symptoms of jetlag was supposedly homosexuality...

Classic.

[Mr Tom]

Halol