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.html

Nature 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.html

This 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_meteorite

pallasite at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallasites

Howardite at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howardite

Many 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_classification

Given 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