Wikipedia talk:Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia/Archive 2

"1.8 Uncertainty Principle

EB has two articles about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: one about the principle itself and another one inside the quantum mechanics treatment. Unfortunately, the two articles give different formulas: one uses h/2 and the other h/4. Furthermore, they never make clear what exactly is meant by 'uncertainty'."

LOL. EB goes postmodern. :-)

Mentioning the anime show "The Big O" as a meaning of the computer science function O(n) ("big O") does not strike me as a particularly sensible way to critique the Britannica. R. Dorothy would not be impressed. --FOo

For the one starting a Making fun of Explorapedia article: --Kurt Jansson 13:41 16 May 2003 (UTC)

See http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/LightMill/light-mill.html for another possible addition to this page.

Is there any reason why the subheadings are at the 4th-level (==== foo ====)? So ugly. --Menchi 21:29, 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)


 * No reason I know of. I've bumped all the headings up a level. --Camembert

"Leap years

EB claims in its leap year article that years divisible by 4000 may be non-leap years. This is in fact not an official rule and would not increase the calendar's accuracy. See w:leap year."

Shouldn't the claim be for "400" years? I am not completely sure of my assertion, and so I am not willing to change this entry yet. However, I do recall that 2000 was claimed not to be a leap year because of the "divisible by 400" rule. Does Britannica really say "divisible by 4000", as opposed to "400"? Four hundred would make much more sense than four thousand, since we haven't quite reached that point yet... -- Lenny-au


 * I'm not sure if the 4000-year adjustment is currently defined -- I think it might not be, though it would fine-tune the calendar more accurately to not have any century years between 3600 and 4400 as leap years. I seem to recall seeing an article in the run-up to Y2K which quoted the original British Act of Parliament of 1752 on how to handle century years, but I don't think it extends as far as 4000AD. -- Arwel 00:53, 4 Jan 2004 (UTC).

I kind of have an issue with having an omissions sections of the page. Any such sections are bound to have omissions.

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The 'swim bladder' piece is highly nit picking. As the particular fish in question could have developed lungs from its swim bladder.Sunja 11:07, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC) Agreed. Sj

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Any reason the items listed here aren't externally-linked to the appropriate EB article? In this article in particular, inline external links would seem appropriate. They would make it much easier to fact check, keep this list up to date, and more... at least for those of us with access to EB online content. Sj 11:50, 13 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Missing Brittanica articles
What about missing Brittanica articles? --Hemanshu 19:46, 23 May 2004 (UTC)

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The population of Australia is wrong. IIRC, it gives about 30 million, when in fact the correct answer is about 20 million. (see the CIA worldbook for the correct number)

As for version number: the start menu lists it as Brittanica 2004. --- Doesn't the article need to be organized by subject? (Mathematics, Physics, etc.) --PuzzletChung

Making fun of Columbia Encyclopedia
Another popular on-line encyclopedia is Columbia Encyclopedia. We don't have a page noting its shortcomings but I noted today that its article list the city of Cahokia as "flourished from c.1300 to c.1700" instead of from "700 to 1400 AD" as our article and the archaeological site's webpage state. 4.229.138.141 14:09, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)