Wikipedia:External peer review/ Financial Times December 2005

Financial Times

 * Source: Financial Times
 * Date: December 23, 2005
 * Title: Wikipedia’s search for the truth - The online encyclopaedia may soon be as credible as it is popular.
 * Author - Robert Matthews
 * URI - http://www.ebusinessforum.com/index.asp?layout=printer_friendly&doc_id=7931

Findings
"To find out how it performs on basic terms in business and economics, we asked Professor Fariba Alamdari, an economist at Cranfield University, to take a look. She says: "I am very impressed. It offers a fairly accurate and comprehensive definition of business terms, with links to other related websites or articles, and sometimes statistics."

Prof Alamdari cites the case of gross domestic product. Wikipedia provides a definition, shows how it is calculated and gives the GDP by country both in nominal terms and based on PPP (purchasing power parity).

She was impressed by the way Wikipedia dealt with such terms as Chapter 11 bankruptcy and return on investment, and those with multiple interpretations such as CRM - which an IT manager would read as Customer Relationship Management but a marketing executive would see as Cause-Related Marketing. Cracks did start to appear, however, with a warning about links to potentially biased commercial sites on the entry for the first interpretation, and no entry at all for the second."