On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 8:43 AM, Andrew Cates Andrew@soschildren.org wrote:
Since you ask on "checking", the checking was such a labour of love I am not even sure we will manage it again. For the record, we had volunteers who were a mixture of students, ex-schools teachers and a few other professionals who went through the version histories of articles, choose two versions by "credible" editors reasonably apart (a month and edits by five editors) , checked the diffs for vandalism, choose the better version, skim read the article, noted sections or text strings for deletion if they looked dubious (do parsnips really induce photosensitivity which is unsourced?). We also took a conscious decision to remove most info about sexual orientation and scandal in biogs, also reduce the volume in year pages of serial killers and terrorist acts to try to get good news/bad news in kilter. A reasonable sample of each volunteers work was double checked by one of two office staff. In some cases (the year pages for example) the volunteers were pretty thorough in checking facts at least for consistency with Wikipedia biogs and we corrected WP a fair bit. In others a recent version by a good quality editor with no vandalism in diffs versus a month earlier was used without much challenge. We then ran a rude word checker and re-choose or deleted where we hit c*** f*** p**** (except birth control and a couple of others) incest (except Anne Boleyn where it was on her death warrant) and a couple of other strings. The only problem with this is some quotations in biogs are now inaccurate to the tune of missing redundant "f***ing". Such is life.
I notice already one teachers discussion forum has a teacher congratulating us on getting the difficult part of the Inca history correct "unlike the main Wikipedia". Of course, that was just version selection to a good editor.
Wow, that's pretty amazing! /me is highly impressed