Wikipedia vs. Britannica - the battle continues:

From timesonline.com: (excerpts)

A WAR of words has erupted over a study claiming that the Encyclopaedia Britannica is only marginally better than its upstart internet challenger, Wikipedia.

The venerable Britannica, founded in Edinburgh in 1768, is demanding that the scientific journal Nature publicly retract its finding that the open-source Wikipedia "comes close" to Britannica in accuracy.

In a 20-page statement on its website, Britannica complained that the Nature study was “fatally flawed”. [...]

But Nature stuck to its guns, and fired back: "We reject those accusations, and are confident our comparison was fair." [...]

Standard stuff. But then the report continues, with a political angle:

More recently, Wikipedia has uncovered efforts by American politicians to clean up their image. Staff of Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat, apparently removed a paragraph from his Wikipedia entry recording his false claim to have flown combat missions over North Vietnam.

Similarly, staff of Senator Norm Coleman, a Republican, rewrote his Wikipedia biography so that he was described merely as an "activist" at university, not a "liberal".

Senators behaving badly. But Wikipedia does appear to have made an error:

A Wikipedia entry for Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma falsely reported that he had been voted "most annoying senator".

So, who is the most annoying senator? Bill Frist is hard to top, what with the Schiavo business. Brownback is pretty rancid (which perhaps isn't "annoying"). But let's not forget the Democrats. Biden is a contender, what with his motor mouth. And Lieberman grates.

Who is the most annoying senator?


posted by Quiddity at 3/26/2006 06:16:00 PM