Wikipedia:External peer review/Shoutwire March 2007

Shoutwire

• Source: Shoutwire
• Date: March 7, 2007
• Title: http://www.shoutwire.com/comments/56188/The_Accuracy_of_Wikipedia The Accuracy of Wikipedia

Findings

This text is copied from the review, which I feel is fair use for improving our encyclopedia:

• Sudbury, Ontario (Grade: A++):

Sudbury, Ontario is not the most well known city on Earth. I figured that this relatively obscure town would have a paltry Wikipedia entry with very little information, and even less accurate info. I was dead wrong.

The entry for my hometown is absolutely exhaustive. Not a single detail had been overlooked. From history to geography to demographics, the entry could not be more perfect.

• Electro refining (Grade: C-):

Uh oh. Right away I noticed a glaring inaccuracy. Entering “electro-refining” redirected me to “Electrowinning.” Anyone involved in extractive metallurgy can tell you that the two processes are different. Electro-refining should definitely have had it’s own article, since electrowinning pulls the metal out of a solution whereas electro-refining involves a solid anode.

Though they could have gone into more detail, the rest of the article is pretty accurate. That being said, I certainly wouldn’t recommend this article as a source for someone researching either electro-refining or electrowinning.

• Ore dressing (The author was looking for ore milling, Grade: D-):

I searched for “milling”, and found a very general article about milling. Nothing mining-specific was in the article, although a great amount of information on the process of milling was listed. Since I don’t give up that easily, I tried looking up specific milling-related techniques. Nothing for magnetofloatation, but ore dressing finally turned up a shitty little article. The author could have gone into waaaay more detail. This article is inaccurate because of the amount of detail that has been omitted. My conclusion? Worst. Article. Ever. (Emphasis added is mine. Jesse Viviano 20:23, 8 March 2007 (UTC))

• Nickel (Grade: B-)

Quite frankly, I expected to be overwhelmed with detail on this one. After all, nickel is something that most people come into contact with every day. However, the article glazed over some of nickel’s unique history, and that kind of irked me because the story of nickel is actually quite entertaining. They could have gone into more detail with the “Old Nick’s Copper” story, for example. Maybe I’m just anal.

The extractive process was reasonably accurate except for what I can only assume was a typo (substitute “sulfide” for “lateridic” in the first sentence) but no information on milling techniques (some specific to nickel) were present.

Other than that, the article was of acceptable quality. My hometown even got a shout-out.

• Shoutwire (Grade:B+)

There is really only one astonishing inaccuracy in this one, under the “Comparisons to Digg” section. ShoutWire doesn’t filter the word “Digg” at all. As a test, I submitted an article titled “Digg.com – Best Site On Earth” and sure enough it appeared on the submissions page. The rest of it was OK, though. I found the section on editorials to be quite entertaining.