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Medical Rights

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According to a BBC News Report, a study on the accuracy of the free online resource Wikipedia by the prestigious journal Nature has been described as "fatally flawed".

The Encyclopedia Britannica stated:

In its December 15, 2005, issue, the science journal Nature published an article that claimed to compare the accuracy of the online Encyclopædia Britannica with Wikipedia, the Internet database that allows anyone, regardless of knowledge or qualifications, to write and edit articles on any subject. Wikipedia had recently received attention for its alleged inaccuracies, but Nature’s article claimed to have found that 'such high-profile examples (of major errors in Wikipedia) are the exception rather than the rule' and that 'the difference in accuracy (between Britannica and Wikipedia) was not particularly great.'

Arriving amid the revelations of vandalism and errors in Wikipedia, such a finding was, not surprisingly, big news. Within hours of the article’s appearance on Nature’s Web site, media organizations worldwide proclaimed that Wikipedia was almost as accurate as the oldest continuously published reference work in the English language.

However: Almost everything about the journal’s investigation, from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading.