The argument about Wikipedia versus Britannica continues to rage in libraryland. The questions are about authority and the likelihood of outright deception, of course, and a recent round brought up the limitations of peer review as exemplified in the 1989 cold fusion controversy, where two scientists claimed to have achieved a nuclear fusion reaction at room temperature. Randy Souther, from the University of San Francisco, asked us to look more carefully:

FYI, cold fusion in 1989 was a media fiasco, but not a fraud. The research is still controversial, but continues today with publications in more than 50 peer-reviewed journals. But you would never realize this by reading Britannica’s one-paragraph article, which is stuck in 1989; Wikipedia’s gives a reasonable overview, and is up-to-date.

So I looked. Here’s the 175 words the Encyclopeadia Britannica Online used to cover the matter:

The fusion of two atomic nuclei at cool temperatures is referred to as cold fusion. Nuclear fusion has been an important area of study in nuclear physics since the 1940s, and from that time, researchers have pursued the possibility of harnessing fusion, which can produce huge amounts of energy from mere hydrogen with minimal radioactive waste, for the generation of electricity. The main obstacle to practical applications of nuclear fusion is that atoms must be heated to tens of millions of degrees Celsius in order to combine at sufficiently high rates. In 1989, however, chemists B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann claimed to have fused atoms of deuterium, which is also called heavy hydrogen because its mass is twice that of ordinary hydrogen, in a simple electric cell at room temperature. The experiment generated great excitement in the scientific community, but other scientists were unable to duplicate Pons and Fleischmann’s results, and their findings were ultimately discredited. Despite skepticism among most nuclear fusion experts, some researchers continue to study the possibility of cold fusion.

And here’s just the introduction to the Wikipedia article:

Cold fusion is the name for a nuclear fusion reaction that occurs well below the temperature required for thermonuclear reactions (millions of degrees Celsius). Such reactions may occur near room temperature and atmospheric pressure, and even in a relatively small (table top) experiment. In a narrower sense, “cold fusion” also refers to a particular type of fusion supposedly occurring in electrolytic cells.

The term “cold fusion” was coined by Dr Paul Palmer of Brigham Young University in 1986 in an investigation of “geo-fusion”, or the possible existence of fusion in a planetary core. It was brought into popular consciousness by the controversy surrounding the Fleischmann-Pons experiment in March of 1989. A number of other scientists have reported replication of their experimental observation of anomalous heat generation in electrolytic cells, but in a non-predictable way, and most scientists believe that there is no proof of cold fusion in these experiments. A majority of scientists consider this research to be pseudoscience, while proponents argue that they are conducting valid experiments in a protoscience that challenges mainstream thinking.

The subject has been of scientific interest since nuclear fusion was first understood. Hot nuclear fusion using deuterium yields large amounts of energy, uses an abundant fuel source, and produces only small amounts of manageable waste; thus a cheap and simple process of nuclear fusion would have great economic impact. Unfortunately, no “cold” fusion experiments that gave an otherwise unexplainable net release of energy have so far been reproducible.

Wordcounts don’t measure quality, but Wikipedia’s 247 word introduction seems much more useful than Britannica’s entire article. More importantly, I like this article as an example of how Wikipedia handles controversy. We’ve seen controversy in articles about charged political or social issues, but I think it’s much easier for most readers to look at this one without feeling for the issue at hand.

Separately… They’re both online, but which one is easier to read? Which one best takes advantage of the medium?

And for those who are interested in cold fusion, Randy (who’s Joyce Carol Oats website rocks) suggested two books on the matter for further reading:

• The Rebirth of Cold Fusion: Real Science, Real Hope, Real Energy
• Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed

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Fresh from Nature: a peer reveiw comparison of Wikipedia’s science coverage against Encyclopaedia Britannica:

One of the extraordinary stories of the Internet age is that of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. This radical and rapidly growing publication, which includes close to 4 million entries, is now a much-used resource. But it is also controversial: if anyone can edit entries, how do users know if Wikipedia is as accurate as established sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica?

Several recent cases have highlighted the potential problems. One article was revealed as falsely suggesting that a former assistant to US Senator Robert Kennedy may have been involved in his assassination. And podcasting pioneer Adam Curry has been accused of editing the entry on podcasting to remove references to competitors’ work. Curry says he merely thought he was making the entry more accurate.

However, an expert-led investigation carried out by Nature — the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica’s coverage of science — suggests that such high-profile examples are the exception rather than the rule. (link added)

Go read the whole story.

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Wikipedia seems to get mixed reviews in the academic world, but I don’t fully understand why. There are those that complain that they can’t trust the untamed masses with such an important task as writing and editing an encyclopedia, then there are others that say you can’t trust the experts with it either. For my part, I’ve come to love Wikipedia, despite having access to EB and other, more traditional sources. Why? Because it takes better advantage of the web than others, and unlike those commercial products, I don’t have to sign in to use it.

In fact, my only criticism of Wikipedia is that I’d like to use it more by integrating it into library resources. One example I use is of putting biography data from Wikipedia into our catalog search results displays. We have three books about Nikola Tesla, but why not include the first few paragraphs from the Wikipedia entry on him?

In my presentations I note the increasing tendency toward self service, even when we know we can get better answers/service by talking with somebody. This is true of travel (when was the last time you booked airfare through a travel agent?), and there are signs that suggest that it’s becoming true in libraries too. What I’m suggesting is that we need to improve our automated systems so that we can continue to serve our patrons even as their needs, expectations, and wants change.

In short, we need to transform our online systems into answer systems. So my criticism of Wikipedia is that there’s a lot of valuable data there that is difficult to automatically link to library data (author names, for instance, are rarely in the library of congress’s authoritative form). I don’t have any real solutions for this right now, and I see a lot of benefit to Wikipedia’s open (more human) form, so I haven’t really argued this much.

Still, I was pleased to see this note in TeleRead suggesting that librarians are “infiltrating” Wikipedia. The tip of the spear seems to be at Quaedam cuiusdam, where Peter Binkley is talking about some things, like OpenURL resolution, that could make Wikipedia a better resource for libraries. Good stuff.

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