Stuart -- You make good points ('render unto academia what is academia's). But I still think further personalization and even clearer attribution would have gone a long way...

'it is disappointing that the main purpose appears to be completing a thesis, with little thought to actually improving Wikipedia'

====>

'This reviewer [again linked] is disappointed that the main purpose appears to be completing a thesis, with little thought to actually improving Wikipedia' or even more strongly 'I (username)...'

To me that's a vivid transformation.

-----

Further--a thought about impact: If we want to make research more impactful, another place to look is the ease with which researchers can test (bad as well as good) ideas. The Wikipedia community has been over-researched: do we *really* want to encourage every MSc student on a 1-year thesis project to engage? Can we, as a research community, facilitate that, if so?

-Jodi

PS-As far as I can tell, this project is a really keen idea -- and perhaps the door is now open for *somebody* to translate the research?

http://hci.cs.umanitoba.ca/projects-and-research/details/intelwiki

On Mon, Jul 7, 2014 at 12:34 AM, Stuart A. Yeates <syeates@gmail.com> wrote:

I've been avoiding jumping into this thread, to let people closer to
the issue have the first say but it seems to me that there are a
couple of things that bear saying:

* We're a cross-discipline group, academia and Wikipedia

* While the portion of the review in question may not have been an
appropriate academic criticism, it was certainly an appropriate
Wikipedia criticism (and a criticism I agree with).

* It's up to those who write it to collectively to decide what the
newsletter to be. Deference to the standards of academia will benefit
the careers of those in academia. Deference to the standards of
Wikipedia will increase the chances of some of this research actually
leading to better outcomes in live wiki. Maybe a better articulation
of this to reviewers and reviewed might help, as might two-part
reviews addressing the concerns of each audience separately.

* I can't believe that there's a shortage of people to write reviews.
I can believe that there's a shortage of people motivated to write
reviews. Maybe we could look at a DYK-like quid pro quo system? Note
that this could be done independently from the editing of the
newsletter, all it would take is a quorum of (potential) editors to
set up a wiki page to coordinate and set standards.

cheers
stuart

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