The science journal Nature performed a head-to-head comparison of Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia and found that Britannica was only slightly more accurate than its online, community-edited counterpart.

The average science entry in Wikipedia had four errors to Britannica’s three. What I found surprising was the Britannica had three errors on average to begin with. Didn’t we used to pay thousands of dollars for bound copies of that reference work?

So if you’re the publishers of Encyclopedia Britannica, how do you respond? Here’s what the Britannica spokesman said: “It is not the case that errors creep in on an occasional basis or that a couple of articles are poorly written. There are lots of articles in that condition. They need a good editor.”

Um, maybe so. But you charge $70/year for your service and Wikipedia is free. What’s more, Wikipedia is less than five years old and is going to get better. Britannica’s been around since 1768 and still has three errors per article.

The Britannica spokesman doth protest too much. Maybe a better approach would be to emphasize the superior quality of writing in Britannica (that’s a structural weakness of wikis), the top-name authors and the links to other proprietary information within Britannica’s reference source family. Attacking a free competitor that’s almost as good as a paid service is dumb.

Oh, and Britannica just cut the price of the 32-volume encyclopedia set to $995 for the holidays. Such a value. If I’m Wikimedia founder Jimmy Wales, I’m already talking with O’Reilly about publishing a competitor.

What would you do if you were Britannica? Post your comments here.