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 expected. While Jimmy Wales, the co-founder and promoter of Wikipedia, expressed delight, he also added: "Our goal is to get to Britannica quality or better".

In a rebuttal published in 2006, Encyclopaedia Britannica refuted Nature's findings, stating: 'Almost everything about the journal's investigation, from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading'. The rebuttal stated that the conclusion of Nature's report was false, because the journal's research was invalid and clearly stated that the purpose of its production was to 'reassure Britannica's readers about the quality of our (Britannica's) content, and to urge that Nature issue a full and public retraction of the article'. The document highlighted a number of concerns about Nature's research methodology including:

Nature responded by rejecting Encyclopaedia Britannica's criticisms, affirming its confidence in the study, and refusing to retract. Numerous other non-academic and academic publications have followed Nature's example, yielding interesting results. In 2007, a study by Stern magazine, compared 50 articles from the German Wikipedia to Brockhaus Enzyklopädie , the largest German language printed Encyclopaedia in the 21st century. Fifty articles from disciplines spanning politics, business, sports, entertainment, geography, science, medicine, history, culture and religion were rated by experts for accuracy, completeness, timeliness and clarity. Wikipedia achieved a mean overall score of 1.7 across disciplines on a scale from 1 (best) to 6 (worst), while entries for the same keywords from the paid online edition of the 15-volume Brockhaus achieved an average overall score of 2.7. Wikipedia articles scored higher on timeliness and accuracy than articles from Brockhaus Enzyklopädie, although the Wikipedia articles were judged too complicated for a lay audience.

The accuracy of Wikipedia entries in the sciences has been scrutinised. In a study published in the Annals of Pharmacotheraphy in 2008, Clauson and colleagues found the scope, completeness and accuracy of drug information in Wikipedia to be statistically lower than 10