Wikipedia talk:External peer review/Nature December 2005/Errors

Serious errors
A lot of these seem like fairly serious errors. Is there any indication of the nature of the Britannica errors? Tfine80 18:46, 22 December 2005 (UTC)


 * The list of Britannica errors is available from the same source. —Steven G. Johnson 19:45, 22 December 2005 (UTC)


 * It might be a good idea to have a second "checkmark" [[Image:Yes check.svg|20px]] Done to show that each of the objections has been addressed. That way we'd know more than one person is satisfied with the solution. - Nunh-huh 05:16, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Comment on Lomborg
In light of Nature, a bit of possibly mildly interesting background on this instance of the Wikipedia process: The Lomborg article, and the related The Skeptical Environmentalist article (about his bestseller book), had been quite unstable for many months, with two small groups (3-4 main participants on each side, formally unaffiliated, but in general agreement) arguing over various details. This was patiently worked through, first with TSE, and then with Lomborg, over time. TSE settled down a few months ago, after much Talk page discussion and many rewrites. Lomborg went through a similar process and settled down a few weeks ago. The addition of the Copenhagen Consensus section (4-Dec-2005) came directly as a result of having apparently resolved the previous issues -- with a more stable article, the beginning of a clean-up and expansion effort was undertaken. So, in this case at least, the process over time for a quite active and contentious article, seems to have worked remarkably smoothly and in a logical fashion... Nature, whenever it took its sample, was dropping in on a work in progress, in the sense that the "error" it found, was essentially already on deck for "repair" (i.e. finish resolving an issue with then current content, then continue fleshing out article)... --Tsavage 18:44, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

what a great idea this page is
now all we need is for nature to list the number of mistakes in wikipedia's remaining 919,700 articles (thought to average 3.86 mistakes each) and for us to correct them here --86.141.50.205 22:07, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Why not nominate one of these artical that got a good review, like quirks, to be the featured artical? --T-rex 01:40, 20 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Good idea - in addition to Nature finding no errors, quark is actually quite good - why don't you nominate it at WP:FAC? Some others, such as lipid, have no errors but are not good enough to be Featured articles. -- ALoan (Talk) 12:09, 20 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Just because they have no errors does not mean that they meet the Featured article standards. For one thing, many of the articles (even though identified as error-free) lack references. Others are extremely short. About half lack images. You get the idea. savidan(talk) (e@) 06:24, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

Only six left
Come on folks. Only six articles left to fix. They are hefty, but we are in the home stretch! Let's finish this up. -- Pinktulip 11:06, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Only three left! -- Pinktulip 20:29, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
 * DONE! -- Pinktulip 14:05, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Case closed?
It seems like, in the rush to show that we had fixed all the changes completely, certain editors erred on the side of simply removing content faulted by the nature study rather than ammending, qualifying, or (well...) correcting it. This is very un-wiki, and I'm worried that we may have gotten carried away. I suggest that we remove the green checkmarks from edits which were simply removed. This gives the impression that the reviewer, looking at the new article, would find no problems with it&mdash;which is not the case when an error is simply replaced with an omission. At the very least, a list should be compiled of the problems which were simply removed so that we can double check if some content should be added in their place. Just want to make sure that we make the most out of this opportunity. savidan(talk) (e@) 06:22, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

A Back Story
At least one of the reviewers of the entries from Encyclopaedia Britannica versus Wikipedia felt that the Nature story was misleading. After the Nature story came out, Daniel Singleton wrote to reporter Mark Peplow of Nature this letter:

"Dear Mark Peplow and the Nature news team,

Allow me to briefly express my outrage at the way my review was reduced to numbers that ultimately misrepresented my review. Had I known that this would be your tact, I would have either changed the way I described things in my review or else simply not participated in a pseudo-science news team evaluation.

Dan Singleton"

The issue that Singleton was complaining about was that the review had clearly identified the Wikipedia entry as better, but the method used to analyze the reviews simply counted errors so that the longer and less defensively written Wikipedia entry looked worse in the Nature story.

Peplow's response was:

"Hi, I'm sorry to hear that you weren't happy with the way the study was done. Ultimately we had to find a way to quantify the errors, omissions, and misleading statements so we could make a crude quantitative comparison between the two sources. For a quick and practical survey, we felt this was the best way to go. Anyway, thanks again for your input, it is much appreciated

best wishes mark"

Singleton's response was:

"Didn't Gibson or Robertson teach you to think ahead? If you are going to just report data as a summary then ask the summary question "All things considered, which entry is better?"  Nature has a certain responsibility that exceeds that of Fox News." Dasingleton (talk) 02:18, 4 March 2009 (UTC)