-----Original Message----- From: Delirium [mailto:delirium@hackish.org]
I don't think academic credentials are very good ones. Perhaps some measure of involvement in Wikipedia would be a reasonable start, as most of our longtime contributors are reasonably reliable.
-Mark
Perhaps articles should be reviewed by at least a couple of people. One 'expert' plus one long term wikipedian, in whom we trust.
Theresa
--- "KNOTT, T" tknott@qcl.org.uk wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: Delirium [mailto:delirium@hackish.org]
I don't think academic credentials are very good ones. Perhaps some measure of involvement in Wikipedia would be a reasonable start, as most of our longtime contributors are reasonably reliable.
-Mark
Perhaps articles should be reviewed by at least a couple of people. One 'expert' plus one long term wikipedian, in whom we trust.
Sounds good to me.
--mav
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This might be discriminitive against people who do not have academic status though. Might have to be careful on that, not all academics are experts! (no degree in plumbing as far as I know)
I can definatly see the advantage of it however, worth investigating!
On Wed, 8 Sep 2004 10:18:31 -0700 (PDT), Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
--- "KNOTT, T" tknott@qcl.org.uk wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: Delirium [mailto:delirium@hackish.org]
I don't think academic credentials are very good ones. Perhaps some measure of involvement in Wikipedia would be a reasonable start, as most of our longtime contributors are reasonably reliable.
-Mark
Perhaps articles should be reviewed by at least a couple of people. One 'expert' plus one long term wikipedian, in whom we trust.
Sounds good to me.
--mav
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Matthew Larsen wrote:
This might be discriminitive against people who do not have academic status though. Might have to be careful on that, not all academics are experts! (no degree in plumbing as far as I know)
There's also other credentials, like "long experience in the field". I imagine John Carmack has credentials when it comes to game AI, despite having no PhD in a related field (or even, gasp, a PhD at all!), for example.
But how to decide this seems a little bit of a case-by-case thing. Perhaps eventually we'll need a Wikipedia meta-editorial board of sorts? Some of these things are really pseudo-editorial decisions, and someone has to make at least some of them. Is someone with a PhD who takes outlandish opinions an expert (Linus Pauling on Vitamin C comes to mind)? We'd have to override their qualifications on a case-by-case basis, hopefully somewhat conservatively. And which non-credentialled people have enough experience to make them experts? Same decision. Of course we don't want a board deciding editorial issues directly ("this article shall say this"), but eventually making some sort of pseudo-editorial decisions ("this guy is not really an expert in the field") seems unavoidable. But how to do that without getting biased ("disqualify all people who disagree with global warming", or something of that sort) I don't have a good answer for.
-Mark
Delirium wrote:
But how to decide this seems a little bit of a case-by-case thing. Perhaps eventually we'll need a Wikipedia meta-editorial board of sorts? Some of these things are really pseudo-editorial decisions, and someone has to make at least some of them. Is someone with a PhD who takes outlandish opinions an expert (Linus Pauling on Vitamin C comes to mind)? We'd have to override their qualifications on a case-by-case basis, hopefully somewhat conservatively. And which non-credentialled people have enough experience to make them experts? Same decision. Of course we don't want a board deciding editorial issues directly ("this article shall say this"), but eventually making some sort of pseudo-editorial decisions ("this guy is not really an expert in the field") seems unavoidable. But how to do that without getting biased ("disqualify all people who disagree with global warming", or something of that sort) I don't have a good answer for.
I guess at least some of this is about the would-be reviewers understanding and accepting the concept of NPOV - there'd be no problem with an expert with an 'outlandish' opinion who accepted it as being outlandish and expected it to be treated that way. Come to that, perhaps we could make it an aim to have an expert from each side of a contentious issue both review the same version of an article...
Of course, that doesn't solve the "what makes an expert anyway?" problem, so I guess *someone* has to decide that.
-----Original Message----- From: Daniel Mayer [mailto:maveric149@yahoo.com]
--- "KNOTT, T" tknott@qcl.org.uk wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: Delirium [mailto:delirium@hackish.org]
I don't think academic credentials are very good ones. Perhaps some measure of involvement in Wikipedia would be a reasonable start, as most of our longtime contributors are reasonably reliable.
-Mark
Perhaps articles should be reviewed by at least a couple of people.
One
'expert' plus one long term wikipedian, in whom we trust.
Sounds good to me.
--mav
I know this may seem to some to be a silly question, but why do you need someone with academic credentials reviewing articles? Any normal encyclopedia simply uses a basic bibliography and the information in the article is from books that are written by experts who have academic credentials already recognized. If we had people simply cite sources for information, then it seems like we would have to worry much less about the reviewers' credentials.
I mostly contribute to articles regarding U.S. Supreme Court cases and legislation, so all I have to do is cite the actual opinion or portion of the U.S. Code. But I imagine if I were contributing to an article on another academic field I am interested in (such as Economics), I would simply cite Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" or Keynes' "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" or whatever economic treatise the particular theory or concept came from. I would think it would make little sense to have an academic scholar waste time signing off on the article if all the reader would have to do is check the text that the information comes from to ensure it's accuracy.
What am I missing?
-Skyler
Patrick Aiden Hunt wrote:
I know this may seem to some to be a silly question, but why do you need someone with academic credentials reviewing articles? Any normal encyclopedia simply uses a basic bibliography and the information in the article is from books that are written by experts who have academic credentials already recognized. If we had people simply cite sources for information, then it seems like we would have to worry much less about the reviewers' credentials.
I mostly contribute to articles regarding U.S. Supreme Court cases and legislation, so all I have to do is cite the actual opinion or portion of the U.S. Code. But I imagine if I were contributing to an article on another academic field I am interested in (such as Economics), I would simply cite Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" or Keynes' "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" or whatever economic treatise the particular theory or concept came from. I would think it would make little sense to have an academic scholar waste time signing off on the article if all the reader would have to do is check the text that the information comes from to ensure it's accuracy.
Well, a big problem is how to present information accurately and not in a misleading way, and simply citing sources gives no guarantee of that. I could cite all sorts of Supreme Court decisions and give a very misleading view by not citing particular ones I should've cited, or only citing obscure portions of well-known decisions, and so on. This can be done either maliciously or because the author wasn't familiar with the wider context so knowledgeable about what to cite.
I agree academic credentials aren't a magic bullet, but I do think review of the _article_ itself, rather than merely requiring sources, is necessary. Given maybe a dozen books on the subject of global warming, for example, I could write an article taking almost any point of view and have plenty of citations to back it up (even if I let you choose the books!), but not all of these articles would be equally reliable.
-Mark
Sort of a tangential issue: Wikipedians should keep in mind here that whatever they do is a positive political and social/cultural act; there is no correct answer to this question.
Whether Chinese should be one language or diverge into multiple languages is somewhat similar to the question 180 years ago over whether the various Greeks spoken throughout the former Ottoman Empire should remain distinct, or be merged into a "common Greek", and perhaps also similar to the eternal disputes in France over the differences between the various regional dialects. If we, for example, say we support having a separate Wikipedia for a particular French dialect (which we do), but we oppose having one for a particular Chinese dialect, then we're making a rather odd political statement. Not that we can't do that, but it should be done on purpose.
-Mark
Sorry, that last message was sent to the wrong list; ignore plz.
-Mark
--- Patrick Aiden Hunt skyler1534@comcast.net wrote:
I know this may seem to some to be a silly question, but why do you need someone with academic credentials reviewing articles? Any normal encyclopedia simply uses a basic bibliography and the information in the article is from books that are written by experts who have academic credentials already recognized. If we had people simply cite sources for information, then it seems like we would have to worry much less about the reviewers' credentials.
Pragmatic; many people will not trust and in fact warn people against using our content otherwise. Think of it as building a bridge to the old way of publishing and to the drones who think that is the only way content can be trusted.
It is also another level of article verification - at least one set of eyes from somebody who has formal training in the subject has looked at the article and says its OK. That is more like how academic/scientific peer review works (although panels in the related field are most often used instead).
I for one value that type of feedback for my articles since I hardly ever write in the area I majored in.
The important thing is that this is in addition to our current best practices and not a replacement for them. Just another layer.
-- mav
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--- "KNOTT, T" tknott@qcl.org.uk wrote:
From: Delirium [mailto:delirium@hackish.org]
I don't think academic credentials are very good ones. Perhaps some measure of involvement in Wikipedia would be a reasonable start, as most of our longtime contributors are reasonably reliable.
Perhaps articles should be reviewed by at least a couple of people. One 'expert' plus one long term wikipedian, in whom we trust.
I think this is spot on; for any Nupedia/Wikipedia 1.0-style project, articles need to be reviewed from at least two angles. First, a "general" review, which can be performed by a compentent layperson -- clarity, grammar, spelling, structure, layout, and basic checks on accuracy, balance and completeness. Second, we need to have articles reviewed by specialists to ensure that the articles are entirely correct, balanced and comprehensive; there's no getting around this, in my opinion.
As an example, I'd point to our current way of marking quality articles: the Featured Articles system. My guess is that 90% of the review there is of the "general" variety, and we shouldn't be surprised if a specialist could find significant flaws in the factual accuracy of a number of Featured Articles. One such case: after ordering and reading half-a-dozen books on the [[Enigma machine]] (recently promoted to a Featured Article), I found a number of errors, and I'm certainly not an expert.
The problem remains to identify experts who can perform specialist review. For some topics, academic credentials would be reasonable evidence of expertise, but I certainly don't think this is the only way to find experts. For, say, a soap opera, perhaps the best way to locate an expert would be to look for a prominent fan site on the Web. I believe a majority of experts would be willing to (at least) read through a Wikipedia article and point out problems if asked. Whether they would be willing to commit to putting down their name (and hence their reputation) as approving a version of an article is another matter, though.
--Matt (User:Matt Crypto)
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