WSJ.com - In a War of Words, Famed Encyclopedia Defends Its Turf

WSJ.com - In a War of Words, Famed Encyclopedia Defends Its Turf: "The venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica is launching an unusual public war to defend itself against a scientific article that argued it's scarcely better than a free-for-all Web upstart.
On Dec. 15, the scientific journal Nature ran a two-page 'special report' titled 'Internet encyclopedias go head to head.' It compared the accuracy of science entries for the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and the online version of Encyclopaedia Britannica.
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Now, Britannica's editors are firing back with a strongly worded open letter demanding that Nature retract its article and a 7,000-word rebuttal on its Web site. Executives at Britannica say the letter will appear in half-page ads in The Times of London, the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune as early as Monday. The letter says that Nature's study "was so poorly carried out and its findings so error-laden that it was completely without validity." The letter was emailed Wednesday to roughly 5,000 librarians, school-district administrators and curriculum coordinators."