On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 8:12 AM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 8 May 2014 01:00, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
As for study design, I'd suggest you begin with a *random* sample of frequently-viewed Wikipedia articles in a given topic area (e.g. those within the purview of WikiProject Medicine), have them assessed by an independent panel of academic experts, and let them publish their
results.
No control, no calibration. Without those you can't really be sure what you've measured. While academic attitudes to Wikipedia may be of some interest they are not a proxy for quality.
Yes Geni, absolutely. If I give Wikipedia's article on diabetes to three acknowledged experts on diabetes for a detailed review, and they tell me at the end of it that it is a wonderful, up-to-date and accurate article – or they tell me that it contains numerous errors of fact – I won't have learned anything. :)
Incidentally, speaking of diabetes, one of the more striking hoaxes in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wikipedia
is "glucojasinogen". It lasted 4.5 years and entered several academic sources that copied a section of the Wikipedia article, before someone discovered that there was no such thing.
One thing I would say is that if Wikipedia articles were to be compared against articles from another source, they should have roughly the same length. It's not fair to compare a 4,000-word article from Wikipedia against a 500-word article from Britannica. Other than that, I think we could leave the study design to those who do this sort of stuff for a living. It's really not something you and I have to work out here on a mailing list.