Vanessa Thorpe, arts and media correspondent at the Guardian Throws the book at the DNB.
The long-awaited publication of Oxford University Press’s updated Dictionary of National Biography should have been another garland around the neck of one of the most respected and scholarly brands in the world. After 12 years of research, the 60-volume edition contains more than 50,000 biographies and costs £7,500.
Yet the growing number of mistakes coming to light in the dictionary’s pages threatens to make it an embarrassment, and some leading scholars even fear the new edition of the DNB is endangering the international reputation of the whole university city of Oxford.
Wikipedia not such shaky ground after all?
As Cory Doctorow observes over at Boing Boing, if those errors had appeared in Wikipedia, they’d be fixed by now.