[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia: the Journal

[WJhonson at aol.com]

In a message dated 9/13/2009 9:46:21 AM Pacific Daylight Time, 
dgoodmanny at gmail.com writes:


> This is somewhat similar to Citizendium, except their peer-review is
> open, as is currently also considered a good practice. they haven't
> gotten very far with it, and they seem to have almost all of our
> problems in maintaining NPOV.
> I suggest we let them develop their model, and we continue ours'.>>

David I think the proposal is for a *new* sister project to Wikipedia, not 
an adjustment of Wikipedia.  Wikinews for example encourages original 
research if you are an eye-witness to something you can write about it.

Citizendium has no traction in the real world (just in their own minds).  
So the benefit of a new sister project might be to try to create actual 
traction with the idea of online peer-review.

I see problems with the idea of "commissioning" works.  When Knol first 
started, they limited it to just invited guests.  Now after some time, those 
invited guests have mostly moved on, and their articles aren't doing great (in 
general).

I would must prefer a method like WikiAnswers where all readers can *vote* 
on who they trust, and *vote* on good questions and good answers, etc, and 
the highest trusted authorities gradually percolate to the top of the heap.

Then those *trust* levels get translated into the articles they've written 
*AND* the articles they've peer-reviewed.  Does that make sense?  Sort of a 
push-yourself-up-from-your-own-bootstraps method of community consensus.

It surely favors the early adapters, but then all IT does that already.  
And even the early adapters (see early Knolians) can get swamped by the more 
industrious and clever and persistent authors.  That however isn't a bad 
thing.  At level 0.5 we'd need to install a panel of judges to settle conflict.

Will Johnson