Talk:Wikipedia

Article shortened

I stripped out the commentary from the article, including the normative statement that MathWorld is preferable. IMX the relationship is quite opposite: MathWorld (which I used quite frequently, and still do at least weekly) has a great many mistakes, both major and minor, while the mathematical articles in Wikipedia are generally not only less error-prone but much more comprehensive. But regardless, I don't think it's the place of the OEIS to decide between them so I cut the material.

Charles R Greathouse IV 05:04, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

As long as you're still active at Wikipedia, I suppose it's not a such a bad place for math; the ruling teenagers there perhaps tolerate professional mathematicians better than other experts. Almost any other topic at Wikipedia requires a huge rock of salt. Alonso del Arte 05:13, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

I can't really speak for many other areas of Wikipedia. (The economics articles are IMO much less good, but I don't know of something similar to MathWorld to which to compare.) Some years ago Nature did a comparison between Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica; the two were found to be comparable in accuracy. (There was a rebuttal and a counter-rebuttal if you're interested.)

But I can't think of a MathWorld article that I prefer to a Wikipedia article (though I'm sure one exists). An example I picked at random:

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/QuadraticReciprocityTheorem.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_reciprocity

The Wikipedia article covers Gaussian, Eisenstein, and other algebraic integers; MathWorld none. The Wikipedia article explains the connections to higher reciprocity laws, MathWorld does not. I wondered at first if MathWorld just divided their information differently, but

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/CubicReciprocityTheorem.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_reciprocity

seems to show that there's simply much more depth and content on Wikipedia.

Now I know that I can find math pages on Wikipedia that I don't like -- an example might be

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_number

But even there it's more an issue with presentation than content, and it's not like the MathWorld article is any better (even though, in that case, I contributed to the MathWorld article!).

And that's not even getting into the many articles like

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kemeny%E2%80%93Young_method

that have no equivalent in MathWorld.

Charles R Greathouse IV 05:45, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

I haven't gone through the rebuttals point by point, but it seems to me that in broad strokes, if you give Wikipedia a really big handicap, then it beats Britannica.

It's one thing to look at Wikipedia for stuff you already know a lot about. If (hypothetically) I encountered an incorrect plot summary of a Family Guy episode, I would know it right away (not that that would ever happen). Since I know a little bit about math, I know there's something not quite right when Wikipedia says the Ramanujan approximation of the partition function improves as n nears infinity <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_(number_theory)#Partition_function_formulas> because my calculations with small n suggest it gets much worse (A190840). I know next to nothing about World War II submarines, so if Wikipedia is wrong about the SM U-123 having two diesel engines and two electric motors, I can't really say. Alonso del Arte 17:00, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

What handicap? Nature didn't give it one. (I can't do a fair comparison myself -- I haven't used Britannica since a 1980s edition.) Once again, I'm not comfortable addressing the accuracy of areas of Wikipedia outside of a small number that I'm familiar with, say math and economics.

The percentage error in Ramanujan's approximation does decrease to 0 asymptotically, so I agree with Wikipedia on that point.

(Unrelated point: A190840 says round to the nearest integer, but the values seem to be rounded down instead.)

Charles R Greathouse IV 03:43, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

According to the Register ("Nature mag cooked Wikipedia study," March 23, 2006), Nature's study "turned up 123 "errors" to Wikipedia's 162." Furthermore, some of the articles presented as Britannica content were actually mash-ups of different Britannica editions put together by the scientist. Even if we accepted the numbers 123 and 162, the conclusion "Wikipedia is more accurate than Britannica" is hardly warranted.

Besides, I personally know someone who has been the victim of both death by Wikipedia and Wikipedia slander. If I seem critical of Wikipedia, that guy will make me look unbiased by comparison.

I've e-mailed you about the Ramanujan approximation because this is getting off-topic for this particular talk page. But I do acknowledge here I may have made some mistakes with A190840, such as which sequence gives the difference between Ramanujan's approximation and the actual partition function. It's possible Mathematica ran into a machine precision issue where the rounding went in the wrong direction but I seriously doubt it; any mistakes with that sequence are most likely my fault and I will not give simultaneous rationalizations and disclaimers like Wikipedia. Alonso del Arte 05:16, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

(de-indent) Of course you are the first to bring up "Wikipedia is more accurate than Britannica", I made no such claim. I might -- though not at the time of the article. (Wikipedia has come a long way since 2005; see, for example, the version of the quadratic reciprocity article as of the date of the Nature article and compare it to the current page.)

I'm sure you wouldn't seriously suggest study by anecdote, so I'll pass over yours without comment.

Charles R Greathouse IV 05:35, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

I'm sorry, that was unfair of me. But I've gotten very tired of people (not you) who will doubt and second-guess the most basic thing I say, yet treat Wikipedia as if it were the Bible. And if Wikipedia ever "kills off" someone you personally know, someone who is not in the best of health, your respect for Wikipedia will be greatly reduced. Take a moment sometime to look over what Wikipedia says about Case Western Reserve, I'm sure you'll find at least a couple of howlers (there's some funny things in there about Wayne State, such as about our shortest serving president).

One thing we can agree on: for good or evil, Wikipedia is a force to be reckoned with. Alonso del Arte 16:39, 16 July 2011 (UTC)