Wikipedia:External peer review/St Petersburg Times November 2004

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[edit] St. Petersburg Times

• Source: St. Petersburg Times
• Date: November 8, 2004
• Title: There's no end to it

[edit] Findings

"The St. Petersburg Times recently asked two University of South Florida professors to read a few Wikipedia articles on topics in their expertise. Chemistry professor Bill Baker said he was surprised at the amount of technical knowledge posted on the site, but said he found several small errors. "The cancer drug Taxol, for example, is not produced by microbial fermentation."

"That bothers me," Baker said of the errors. "I think that even if 99 percent of your facts check out, it is a disservice to promulgate 1 percent inaccuracies."

Professor Philip Levy, an expert on Colonial America, said that "in many respects it's very good," but he, too, had misgivings. He said some articles contained a mishmash of information - the established scholarly knowledge of 15 years ago was mixed in with newer, more controversial theories with little distinction."

[edit] Responses

See Wikipedia talk:Response to the Guardian