The Britannia empire strikes back

According to recent reports in The Times , the BBC, The Washington Post and The Australian (reprinted from The Times), Encyclopedia Britannica has come out fighting to challenge the claims made by Nature that it is a less reliable source than Wikipedia.

For the EB response see here; for Nature's see here. So far Wikipedia has not responded though at the time of posting this item its EB entry includes a section on "competition", which states:

Today, one of the biggest challenges to the Britannica is the ease with which people can find information online. Many people simply prefer to find information with the help of a search engine. A particular challenge to the Britannica is the emergence of Wikipedia, a Web-based free-content encyclopedia written collaboratively by volunteers. Wikipedia is much larger than the Britannica (1,000,000 articles compared to 120,000, and 340 million words compared to 55 million). Both Wikipedia and the Britannica contain articles on subjects that the other does not. The journal Nature reported on December 14, 2005 that science articles in Wikipedia were comparable in accuracy to those in the Britannica: Wikipedia had an average of four mistakes per article, while the Britannica contained three.^[3] However, Nature indicated that some of the Wikipedia articles they reviewed were "poorly structured", or "confusing".^[4] On 22 March2006, Britannica published an open letter which criticised the study as inaccurate, 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."^[5]. Nature responded in a press release issued on 23 March 2006 which rejected Britannica's criticisms, and declined to retract the study. ^[6]