David- While I'm not too happy with what he did, I do hope that it breathes some fresh life into the peer review discussion. The two core weaknesses of Wikimedia are people acting like assholes and people who don't know what they're talking about. If we systematically review and flag particular revisions of articles, we can create a space within which they do not exist. The validation system which is currently in CVS is only a rating system and doesn't really help in sorting out individual facts. I'm afraid that as a sole measure, it would contribute to the problem rather than solve it, as people grow eager to push articles through quality control and choose high ratings. These articles then attain a false notion of being authoritative. Similarly, controversial articles might never gain such status because some people don't like their content. There's an interesting project going on here: http://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Check Like the participants in this project, I've been thinking a bit about ways to mark-up individual facts in articles. Essentially, I want to take a text like The inscription is approximately 15 metres high by 25 metres wide, and 100 metres up a cliff from an ancient road connecting the capitals of Babylonia and Media (Babylon and Ecbatana). and mark up parts of it, like so: ??The inscription is approximately 15 metres high by 25 metres wide?? "??..??" means that this part of the article needs a source. Using CSS, all passages marked with "??" could be highlighted or not, depending on personal preferences. or like this: ^+The inscription is approximately 15 metres high by 25 metres wide [[Source:Behistun, p.84]] The part starting with "^+" would be referenced by the [[Source:]]. There could be different markup for different quality citations, e.g. ^- for a general encyclopedia or Google citation and ^= for a secondary source citation. The [[Source:]] namespace could be a magic template-type namespace that would load the bibliographical data from a page and insert it into a footnote, so we don't have to keep inserting the same information. Using a method like this, we have real semantic information about individual facts and can easily make statements like * 80% of the facts in this article have sources * 40% of the sources we cite are of high quality * Source X is used in Y articles Of course these claims themselves could be faked. But together with stable-revision flagging and a consensus-based peer review process associated with every page, we could try to do for quality what we've done for quantity. If you wanted to, you could view only articles that have been reviewed and that are deemed 100% accurate. Regards, Erik

On 06 Sep 2004 11:26:00 +0200, Erik Moeller &lt;erik_moeller(a)gmx.de&gt; wrote: Yes, an abiding problem with ratings. I think ratings / flags are mainly useful as a tool for isolating targets for cleanup, and as a distributed vehicle for VfD-style comments (it would be nice to separate out as metadata the review/VfD/controversial status of an article) . As for source annotation and fact checking : Indeed! Or [[Source:Behistun-1992|p. 84, see image caption]], where the source: reference produces the base of the footnote/reference, and the rest is specific information to be added at the end of the reference. also * 20% of articles with <<NPOV>> tags reference more than one source * average # of (marked) significant verifiable facts per article Well, this gets us closer to a zero-knowledge proof of article validity and user reliability, as one can very directly and specifically check the accuracy or sincerity of another's work. +Sj+