Roll up for the public battering of the publishing heavyweights. In the red corner, from London, England, 'the world's top multidisciplinary science journal,' and in the blue corner, from Chicago, Illinois, 'the oldest continuously published reference work in the English language.' Ding! Ding! Round 1: Nature lands the opening blow with a linkurl:news article;http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html on December 14 that compared the accuracy of science coverage from Encyclopaedia Britannica and Wikipedia, concluding that that are 'numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but ? the difference in accuracy was not particularly great.' Encyclopedia Britannica clearly hurt: chock full of errors and no better than a free upstart that anyone can write for? This was sufficiently interesting for us to linkurl:write about;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/23079/ . Round 2: Nature apparently stung, because a week after publication they provide linkurl:'supplementary information';http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/exref/supplementary_information.doc and admit that 'No test is perfect and we acknowledge that any of our reviewers could themselves have...

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