As Phoebe and (I think) Anne point out, there are many relevant aspects of
quality. Readability, pertinence, neutrality, concision and
comprehensiveness are all important factors but, when it comes to safety
and efficacy claims in our medical articles, for me they pale into
insignificance beside that other element of quality: veracity.
I agree with those above who highlight the flaws in the current scholarly
peer-review process. If enWikipedia is to embrace scholarly review (and we
should) we need to confront and address the well-known problems with peer
review in today's scholarship.
Whether we use scholars to assess the veracity, pertinence,
comprehensiveness and neutrality of our articles as part of a
self-assessment process, or as a service to our readers, I believe the
quality of our scholarly review must be beyond reproach.
Above I mention the journal Open Medicine has peer-reviewed a version of
Wikipedia's "Dengue fever" thanks to the tireless efforts of Doc James and
others (not me). I see this as a significant threshold. Once that article
is published in the journal, James will be adding a clickable icon to the
top of the current Wikipedia version, linking the reader to the PubMed
abstract (or PubMed Central full version - I'm not sure which).
I know nothing about Open Medicine's editorial or review processes, though.
As a start - to break this new ground - I am delighted to have this go
forward as it is. But can we bend our minds now - or soon - to the question
of whose reviewed versions should we be linking to. If the Journal of the
New Zealand Acupuncture Society reviews and publishes a version of our
"Acupuncture" article, do we link to it at the top of the article? If the
Lancet - publishers of Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent MMR
vaccine-autism-collitis paper overcomes its issues with CC-BY-SA and
reviews and publishes a version of "Cancer", do we link to it?
I have a lot more to say on this issue but would like to hear some civil,
thoughtful responses to the above before ploughing ahead. Let me say again,
to be very clear, I support linking to the reviewed version of "Dengue
fever". It is after all virtually identical to Wikipedia's current version,
and any differences in the current version have not had the added filter of
expert eyse from the scholarly-review process. But it is time for us to
start thinking carefully and talking amongst ourselves about the question
of scholarly review.
Anthony Cole <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Anthonyhcole>
Anthony Cole <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Anthonyhcole>
On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 1:56 AM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 10:13 AM, edward
<edward(a)logicmuseum.com> wrote:
On 08/05/2014 17:58, geni wrote:
>So while it is unlikely that a published
journal article would be a
complete hoax
This is because they have a robust review process, which Wikipedia
doesn't. Enough said.
Geni did say "unlikely", not "it never happens":
http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papeā¦
By which I which I don't mean to say most literature is useless or a fraud:
it's not! But it's also not a 100% black or white picture.
-- phoebe
--
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers <at>
gmail.com *
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>