Britannica responds to Nature
Three months after the prestigious science journal Nature published a comparison of the accuracy of 42 science articles in the online version of Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia (see archived story), Encyclopædia Britannica Inc (EBI) has published a response to the study. The 20-page open letter, titled "Fatally Flawed", was published in PDF format and linked from the "EB News" box at http://www.britannica.com/ on 22 March. (An HTML version is also available.)
According to the Associated Press, an email from Patricia A. Ginnis (Senior Vice President at EBI) was sent to 5000 customers pointing towards the PDF file. The Wall Street Journal [1] said that EBI will also publish half-page-advertisements[2] defending their position on Monday 27 March in a group of English newspapers.
Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. denounced the Nature study, stating that "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," and called for the journal to make a public retraction of the article. EBI criticized Nature for rearranging, reediting, and excerpting Britannica articles; mistakenly identifying inaccuracies; reviewing texts that were not part of the encyclopedia proper; failing to fact-check the inaccuracies its reviewers cited; and misrepresenting its findings in the article headline and in the editorial which accompanied the news article.
EBI then went on to detail their disputes with about half of the errors found by Nature, in many cases simply rejecting the criticism outright. They indirectly acknowledged that the other half of the errors were correctly identified, and Tom Panelas, EBI spokesman, was quoted as stating that some of the errors were already known but so far had not been corrected. Neither Nature nor EBI identified how long these errors had been known at Britannica.
The Associated Press story about the dispute was widely covered in the mass media (see further press coverage).