War of the words

The row that has broken out between Encyclopaedia Britannica and scientific journal Nature continues.

The publisher of Britannica took real umbrage against Nature and has retaliated with a  20-page rebuttal to Nature's study in December that counted up errors found iin both Britannica and online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Calling the study "so error-laden that it was completely without merit" and "fatally flawed", Britannica has called on the journal to retract the study, which concluded that the rival encyclopaedias were about as accurate as each other on science.

Nature's experts had looked at comparable entries from the two rivals and found 162 factual errors, omissions or misleading statements for Wikipedia, compared with 123 for Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The article was widely seen as a validation of Wikipedia's content and methods. Where traditional encyclopaedias like the Encyclopaedia Britannica have experts producing articles on subject matters, Wikipedia entries can be created and edited by anyone with access to the internet.

Wikipedia's founders have always maintained that accuracy is ensured by self-policing by its readers and contributors.

Encyclopaedia Britannica claims on its website that the report contained "a pattern of sloppiness, indifference to basic scholarly standards, and flagrant errors so numerous they completely invalidated the results".

Nature responded by rejecting those accusations, stating that it was " confident that [its] comparisons are fair".

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said in a statement on its website: "Our goal is Britannica-or-better quality, but we're not completely there yet.

"We've been working on Wikipedia for less than five years, and it's a testament to the strength of our community that we should come so close to them at this point.

"As we get more people to contribute their expertise, I know that the clarity, readability, and accuracy of Wikipedia content will continue to improve."