There’s been a lot of interest lately in Wikipedia, the freely-available, freely-editable online encyclopedia. An awful lot of people are still unfamiliar with the power of collaborative anything, and simply can’t conceive of how Wikipedia could be what it is, or why it works.

Helpfully, Nature recently sponsored a comparison of science entries in Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is still the gold standard in print encyclopedias. The results are here, and are startling primarily to people who simply Don’t Get It. In short, Wikipedia compared very favorably in accuracy to the EB.

But here’s the advantage to Wikipedia that makes it more or less inevitable that it will win, and that giant print encyclopedias will lose: if Nature chose to reveal what the specific errors in Wikipedia were, they’d be fixed within minutes. That is, by the close of the day in which the score was EB: 123 errors, Wikipedia: 162, the game would have changed, and the new score would be Wikipedia: 0, EB: 123.

The very thing that makes many people question Wikipedia’s accuracy – the fact that anyone and everyone can edit and update information – is the thing that gives Wikipedia an insurmountable advantage. It can be fixed, in real-time, as soon as anyone sees a problem.

I remember reading John Seigenthaler’s plaintive whine about the Wikipedia entry on him. It was immediately apparent that he Didn’t Get It. After all, if you find an article on Wikipedia that’s wrong – fix it! Instead of writing a long article in USA Today and complaining to Bellsouth and everywhere else, he could have just fixed the entry.

Update: Factual Error Found on the Internet!