Wikipedia and Meteorites
Paul bristolia at yahoo.com Wed Dec 21 00:26:08 EST 2005
Recently, there was a study in Nature, which compared the
quality of articles in Wikipedia to the quality of articles in the
Encyclopedia Britannica. One news article was:
Journal: Wikipedia as accurate as Britannica
Nature study covered side-by-side comparison of scientific
topics, CNN News, December 15, 2005, at:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/12/15/wikipedia.ap/index.htmlNature paper discussed in this article is;
Giles, Jim, 2005, Internet encyclopaedias go head to head. Nature.
vol. 438, no. 7070 pp 900. doi:10.1038/438900a at;
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html and
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/box/438900a_BX1.htmlThis article stated:
"Wikipedia has become the 37th most visited website, according
to Alexa, a web ranking service."
If Wikipedia is the 37th most visited website, then it would certainly
be a place where members of this list can educate the public about
various aspects of meteorites. Looking at the meteorite-related
articles on Wikipedia, there are many articles, which could use some
input from members of this list. If a person looks up the Canyon
Diablo meteorite and pallasites, a person finds only a bear stub of
an article. Examples of woefully incomplete articles are.
Canyon Diablo meteorite at;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canyon_Diablo_meteoritepallasite at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PallasitesHowardite at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HowarditeMany of the categories linked at "Meteorite classification are missing
articles or have the next to nothing in them as can be seen by checking
the links for them at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteorites_classificationGiven the traffic that this site gets, it might be worth the effort to
create some decent entries in the Wikipedia about various aspects
of meteorites,
Best Regards,
Paul