The real point is that there are probably inaccuracies in all sources. Every source, including Wikipedia and Britannica, has its strengths and weaknesses.

And of course, not all errors are created equal. For instance, a Nature reviewer prefers the spelling “Crotona” to Britannica’s “Crotone”. The proper English spelling of the name of this Italian town might be a bit hard to pin down, but the U.S. Board on Geographic Names and other sources agree with Britannica on this. Nature reviewers cited some Wikipedia articles as “highly misleading” or “absoultely wrong”. Are these problems really comparable? Nature reported them as if they were.

Although several errors within Britannica were identified by the Nature review (and corrected as fast if not faster than the errors in Wikipedia), Britannica wrote a detailed response to the study, citing profound errors in the study’s premise and methodology. For instance, Nature sent one reviewer a 300 word introduction to a 6500 word EB article, who cited the Britannica article for omitting key information (that was covered in the 6200 words the reviewer didn’t see). See http://corporate.britannica.com/britannica_nature_response.pdf for more.