I just finally got around to reading my June 2006 Communications of the ACM (an academic computer journal) and spotted a little news brief about Britannica trying to sue Nature magazine for this December 2005 Article that noted that the error rate in science entries of Wikipedia is comparable to that in Britannica.

Nature magazine is the premier peer-reviewed high-level publication for science in the world. For an article to get into this journal, it has to be rigorously supported. Their discussion of the controversy is here.

One point about the coverage I hadn’t seen was the different natures of how the information was put together in each of these encyclopedias.

Britannica is Intelligently Designed. For a dozen decades they hired the best and brightest crafters of techinical prose to cover all the subjects that the intelligent editors can think of as being worthwhile. Yes, the design is always evolving. But it is limited by the need to have a designer watching and controlling its growth and changes.

Wiki evolved from chaos. It provided an environment, and anyone was invited to add and edit entries. It covers millions of more subjects than Britannica can hope to. It cross references virally, with apparently absurd links to subjects that someone thought were related, and often do turn out to be relevant. People do go in and edit and even mark content to remove. There is some oversight to prevent ideology from trumping understanding. But basically, it is an example of pure evolution with no plan or guidance.

So my point is that over a hundred years of intelligent design has produced something that, in its limited intersecting subset, is slightly better than the half-decade of raw evolution produced.

Okay, the Britannica only consults experts, and Wiki entries are written by everyman. But usually knowledgeable amateurs or even parties to the discoveries themselves. It’s only a century or so since that difference was moot. Chas. Darwin had a degree in Divinity. R. Feynman made a study of the behavior of a Frisbee, and got a Nobel when he applied the math he worked out for flying disks to electron behavior. Interested amateurs often become closet experts in fields for which they have no papers. But, I digress. So here I’ll stop.