Following some of the responses to my recent article on featured
articles<http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/v…82>,
I decided to carry out a single test run of what adding expert feedback to
the featured article process might look like. To this end, I selected
(several days ago) a recently-promoted featured article, The Open
Boat<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Boat>at>,
and set out to find an expert reviewer. I initially asked Paul Sorrentino,
a professor at Virginia Tech, biographer of Crane and editor of several
works on Crane, to have a look at the article. He declined to participate,
saying that he was currently too busy, but recommended that I approach
Stanley Wertheim, author of, among many other books, The Stephen Crane
Encyclopedia. Professor Wertheim kindly agreed to undertake the review, and
produced the following commentary for me (which he agreed to have publicly
distributed):
"Dear Mr. Lindsey*,*
The W*i*kipedia article on "The Open Boat" seems to me for the most part
well-written, accurate, and appropriate to the topic. I do not find serious
omissions and it seems to me that the major biographical sources and
critical views are well represented. I believe that it is a good thing that
some of the more recent post-modern critical interpretations are not
presented since they would only confuse the general reader, as I think they
confuse many professional readers.
*
*
*Introductory Paragraph*: It may be misleading to say that the Commodore sank
after hitting a sandbar. The Commodore was beached twice on sandbars in the
St. John’s River before it attained the open sea, and the following day the
ship foundered following a mysterious leak in the engine room that could not
be contained.
* *
The story is not told “from the point of view of an anonymous
correspondent.”* *There is* *a detached narrator. The focus is on the
collective (and sometimes individual) consciousness of the four men in the
dinghy as they react to their ordeal. This mistake is repeated in the *Plot
Summary* section where it is stated that the narrarion is from the point of
view of the Correspondent, based on Crane himself. Also in this section “the
metaphysical conflicts” are described as “the correspondent’s thoughts”
rather than the collective reflections of the men rendered by the
third-person narrator. What is more puzzling is that some of this confusion
is attributed to me (See ftn. 27) when in fact I clearly state in the source
cited that these are the reflections of “the collective mind of the men in
the dinghy,” not those of the Correspondent.
* *
*Publication History*: The newspaper prelude to “The Open Boat, “Stephen
Crane’s Own Story” was not first published in the *New York Press*. It was
printed in various newspapers on January 7, 1897, by the Bacheller syndicate
and the title was taken from the *New York Press* version.
*Man Versus Nature*: In “they came to believe that nature instead
ambivalent,” I would substitute “indifferent” for “ambivalent.” Indifference
is stressed in the rest of the paragraph. “Ambivalence” would indicate
personified and contrasting attitudes rather than neutrality.
Why is the the Commodore sometimes referred to as simply Commodore? Isn't
the article "the' necessary?"
I would like to think that we can all agree that Professor Wertheim's
critical response is a helpful one, and that adapting the article
appropriately would be of benefit to Wikipedia. The entire process of
finding an expert to review the article took no more than a half hour of my
time and produced a benefit for Wikipedia that substantially exceeds that
cost.
Thus, I would like to reiterate my call for the use of expert reviewers. I
am happy to lend my assistance to anyone who would like to become involved
in contacting experts. Obviously, the authors of featured articles should
be the best-suited for contacting experts, as they should have a grasp of
who might be appropriate to ask, and so forth, but this need not always be
the case.
Finally, though this idea failed to gain any real traction on wiki, I would
like to state my support for the idea of adding a fifth criterion to
WP:WIAFA: "5. The article, if possible, has been reviewed by an external
subject-matter expert." Even if no such criterion is added, though, I would
like to emphasize that it will always, or nearly always, be productive to
attempt to find an expert reviewer.
David Lindsey