An editor at Nature e-mailed me a response to Encyclopedia Britannica’s complaints summarized in this earlier post. You can see Nature‘s response here. Basically, Nature stands by its story and says it took material from non-Britannica reference works because that’s the content Britannica was posting on Britannica.com and Nature was comparing apples to apples. That’s an explanation but I’m not sure I buy it. When you question Encyclopedia Britannica’s accuracy, you really should be sure you’re talking about the encyclopedia and not a summary written for schoolkids. It doesn’t appear that Nature made that distinction. Other than that, though, the rebuttal provides a plausible defense of the research methodology. And don’t lose track of the big picture, which is that Nature demonstrated that, nitpicking aside, Wikipedia is pretty damned good.