I think George pretty well nailed it -- these issues come down to what should be expected, and also what can reasonably be expected, of a project with Wikipedia's structure. In general, there's nothing inherently wrong with pushing for a certain point of view; it's a great thing to do, and should be encouraged. It's just that Wikipedia isn't a good place to do it. It's not designed to adjudicate that kind of thing, and efforts to push it in that direction will predictably and understandably be resisted by those who care about what the site *is* designed to do, and capable of doing.
John, I want to say -- and I suspect many others here agree -- this is absolutely an appropriate list to bring this up on, and I'm glad you did. Interacting in an open community like Wikipedia takes some getting used to. I think in a discussion like this, you'll almost always get somebody musing about whether or not you've chosen the right forum. Sometimes that's useful feedback; other times it's noise best ignored. I encourage you to go with your own judgment; an argument about the proper forum probably doesn't benefit anybody, but even if a couple folks don't feel this is the right place, the discussion can still go on (as you can see).
Have a good weekend, -Pete [[User:Peteforsyth]]
On Oct 26, 2012, at 5:28 PM, George Herbert wrote:
We are not trying to solve the greater peer review problem. Society and the world at large are not fraud or mistake proof; they happen, they're corrected over time. The world moves on.
Our standard is not to try and attain a perfect level of only totally truthful information. Nobody could realistically do that. Our standard is to aim for and have quality controls to not be worse than the world at large in a given field. I.e., we accept on first assertion that external fields' internal peer review is "good enough", though we will usually at least listen to counterarguments that some sources may in fact be better or worse than that.
We are absolutely not the first determiner of truth / first peer review instance. We aren't, we can't be with this type of volunteer structure, and we should not be asked to be.
We reflect the consensus of others as published in works we can reliably cite. We're a tertiary source preferably.
On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 3:06 PM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis xekoukou@gmail.com wrote:
For subjects that aren't controversial, the peer reviewing structure of a university or journal might work.
In general though, a peer review is as good as the credibility of the peer reviewer. A reference is as good as the credibility of the referencer,etc... That is the essence of the pagerank algorithm that is used by google to compute the credibility of an internet page.
The solution to this problem is really easy IMO. Let all articles be forked and provide a personalized reputation system that will only fetch only one page per article for every user.
2012/10/27 George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com
Right. We (Wikipedia) are not qualified to judge if these original claims are accurate, reasonable, worthy of consideration, unlikely, incorrect, or batshit insane.
Attempting to publish novel theories via Wikipedia - no matter how well supported - is completely the wrong approach. Scientific inquiry is not a single-handed enterprise. It depends on peer review of theories and evidence and conclusions. That peer review must be by qualified peers in the field.
-george william herbert
On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 9:40 AM, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
It's pretty simple, publish original work elsewhere first.
Fred
Greetings –
I hope this is a good place to send a weighty message to Wikipedia. You’ll want to read all through.
I am a scientist who has always liked the Wikipedia idea, and I like your implementation. Lately I’ve started making contributions. Although I’m a cognitive scientist who taught biological psychology at degree level for several years and have done AI research since the ‘80’s, I’ve diverted for a decade or more to resolve a set of major evolutionary puzzles.
John V. Jackson.
http://sciencepolice2010.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/sciencepolice2010-launches...
http://sciencepolice2010.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/sciencepolice-14-latest...
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-- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com
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Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
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