The Reality Check Episode 39

Wikipedia/Britannica+Homemade Pesiticides+Dark Meat Myth

Part 1:

Wikipedia or Britannica? Is Wikipedia as reliable as Britannica?

There's this research done by Nature around 4 years ago, around 50 encyclopedias sent in their own entries on a broad range of scientific discipline. Only entries that were within the right limit were looked at. Each of the entries were sent to the experts of the field to see if they are correct or not for peer review. The experts were told to look for 3 types of inaccuracy, factual errors, critical admissions, and misleading statements. When the experts gave back the entries, they would have typed down the errors to let the encyclopedia know. 

The result is: The average scientific entries of Wikipedia contains 4 errors or admissions, while Britannica had 3. 

3 months later, Britannica released a 20 paged paper about how Nature is "fatally flawed". Almost everything about the journal's investigation from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the articles and their headlines was wrong and misleading. Britannica thinks everything should be just trashed. They think there are 5 problems:

1: Nature declined their repeated request to make the full reports available.

2: Nature reviewed text that wasn't even from the encyclopedia Britannica.

3: Nature accused Britannica of omissions on the basis of the reused of articles exerts, not the articles themselves.

4: Nature changed Britannica articles. 

5: Nature failed to distinguish minor errors from big errors and counted errors that did not exist. 

Nature stands by itself and say that they did not make the reviews public because they felt that it might reveal the reviewers identity. 

So, people are still arguing if Britannica is better than Wikipedia or not. We can just go look at the reports that can be viewed and decide for ourselves which one to trust more. But, we still have to keep in our minds that doesn't matter which encyclopedia, they will all have some errors. So, we must be careful. 

Part 2:

Recently, governments have been telling their people to stop using homemade pesticides. A lot of people say that they use homemade pesticides because for one it's much cheaper and it gets the job done as well. The government tells us that because we don't have the full knowledge on how the homemade pesticides will react to things, and what side effects it might have, it's dangerous to use homemade pesticides. A lot of people think that it's homemade, how dangerous or toxic can it be? But, just because you use "organic" things, and stuff from home, doesn't mean it can't be dangerous. 

Science Myth of the Week: 

Healthier meat versus dark meat, which is tastier? Which one is healthier? 

Dark meat is of course tastier, but it's a bit harder to cook. 

Dark meat is slightly higher in nutrients, but it is also higher in fat. So, white meat is healthier.