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Britannica & Wikipedia

Michael Hart - 5/8/2007

I finally decided to read Britannica's response to the whole Nature thing about Wikipedia, but I must first admit that I overestimated Britannica, yet again, and I would not have read it, particularly in that dreaded .pdf format, if I had known how much "yellow journalism" it would entail.

Their title states that they "refute" Nature's article, but there is little of "refutation" in the following from their opening salvos:

First they claim the instant death of Wikipedia in "Fatally Flawed," written in a headline format only suitable for tabloid journalism.

Skipping over a few lesser evils, we arrive at "vandalism," as just cause for inclusion in a "refutation."

Moving right along to the next Britannica statement they use a time honored ad hominem fallacy combined with an ad hoc proper hoc, claiming we should believe them as per the fact they are: "the oldest continuously published reference in the English language."

They mention "errors" in Wikipedia right up front, but don't name a single example at this juncture, not even to mention that some will be mentioned below and this is somewhat dubious.

Britannica's footnotes, while certainly impressive looking, weren't to support any particular factual evidence they had presented, from at least this portion of their missive.

Then they jump straight to: "The conclusion was false" as the lead of the next page. Yet more "yellow journalism" because there had been nothing said concerning any actual presises on which to base a conclusion, any conclusion, based on any facts in evidence, since a single fact had yet to be presented, only commentaries, no quotes. Finally, after all this, and only after all the "yellow journalism" that brought Britannica down to the tabloid level in introductions, is there a reference to what will come below, which we are presumed to accept will be the missing "evidence."

However, at this point Britannica has already lost all credibility, and anyone who was expecting an erudite refutation will have gone.

By the way, after misusing it's own headline, "Fatally Flawed," as much as I admire the nice alliteration, Britannica goes on to make the claim that Nature used "Misleading Headlines". . .it's nice to see comments about people living in glass houses still applies for Encyclopedia Britannica, as well.

Obviously I'm not going to review their entire 20 pages here, so I will simply state, for the record, that Encyclopedia Britannica is biased in it's reporting, all the way back to their most famous of editions, the 11th, coming up on its 100th anniversary now, and it has been admitted by Britannica to a certain extent when they said that the 11th edition, perhaps the most famous encyclopedia of all history, should not be placed on the Internet for fear that people would confuse the more obvious biases of a century ago with modern biases that are supposedly much harder to detect.

Once again I state for the record, that no matter how much EB will say to today about how their current editions are bias free, their articles more accurate, that 100 years from now the current EB has to expect to look as much like the 11th in comparison from times a hundred years from now, as the 11th looks after 100 years.

Since I can't do the entire article, I will skip to the end, where there are a few responses, perhaps of the straw man fallacy Dept., and I will simply quote the opening phrase of some of Britannica's closing salvos, which are of equal infotainment value as those put above at the beginning of this commentary:

"We do not accept this criticism."

"The article does not claim or imply that. . .explains all there is to know about. . . . . . .is clearly used only as an example."

"Some form of [THIS as well as THAT existed]. . . . We stand by the author's decision to focus on the [THIS]. . . ."

"We do not accept this."

"We do not accept this criticism of our phrasing."

I loved the one about clouds, but it's too long to re-write here, but worthy of a look if you are interested in EB defensiveness in a quite obvious situation.

So is the one about quarks.

The one about Galen and Vesalius is great, but long, I may yet include it in my comments, given how important it is.

Same for the Paul Dirac responses. . .again very cute, but not, I'm afraid as obvious as the in the situation of the clouds.

One begins to think about how the Ancient Greeks thought about the noises clouds make.

". . .because this is a dated yearbook article, it had no place in a study of encylopedias."

Gee, that's funny, it says Encyclopedia Britannica, yes?

Same for:

"We do not ccept the validity of these criticisms. The reviewer has commented on text from the Britannica Student Encyclopedia, which is a much more general product for a younger audience. . . ."

Then don't call it an encyclopedia, and with Britannica on it.

"The author of the article. . .is willing to accept valid notices of inaccurcy in his article, but he simply disagrees with this criticism." [No rational reason for the disagreement, or support of the original.]

"The article's verbal description of this process for making ammonia isso clear tat the reviewer's recommended addition of a chemical equation is unnecessary."

As if everyone knows hydrogen and nitrogen gasses come in paired atoms and combine in a ratio of 2 nitrogens to three hydrogens. Duh! I was a chemistry major and while I do remember some of this, not in general. The one on genetics is particularly funny, esp. if you think .5 genes passed on is not included in a "fraction" of genes passed on: for which we get "There is no inaccuracy here."

"We do not accept this. The article does not imply that the described procedure is the only one used."

Yet, there is no way to infer that it was not.

"We do not consider these [to be] critical omissions."

And even when Britannica IS forced to make a correction:

"We have corrected the [Britannica's/our implied but not stated] that several thousand people are "engaged" in the committee's efforts. However, we stand by our statement [not repeated] that outside experts are frequently consulted during the process, a reasonable statement supported by information available on the Web sites of. . . ." The URLs were not given, nor was there a link to follow.]

"This accusation is simply wrong. The proper modern spelling of this town as Crotone, according to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names and several reputable atlases."

When I was living in Romania, someone asked me to read something in an English textbook, but it didn't make any sense, so I couldn't tell what was a noun, a verb or an adjective. The person insisted it was English, perhaps as old as Chaucer. I had read Chaucer in the orginal, and could at least make sense of the stories without a translation, but not in this case. I finally asked sarcastically, if the book had been written by Romanians, and got a positive reply.

"But they are experts, PhDs!" Sorry, they are not native speakers, and probably haven't read the original Chaucer, either, was my reply. The point is why didn't Britannica ask someone who lived there?!

Saving the best for last.

"The very last sentence is true only for. . . ."