On Saturday 28 August 2004 06:06, Jens Ropers wrote:
Hi,
If you doubt the standards of our editorial review
mechanisms, go try
and introduce some decidedly un-encyclopaedic (unproven, contentious
and/or unacademic, etc.) information into an article of your choice.
Then check back and see how long your contribution will remain in the
article. My confidence is high that -- depending on how much this
contribution falls short of encyclopedic standards -- you will find
your contribution challenged on the respective article's discussion
page (where you will likely be asked to provide references for your
claims) or outright removed.
we just had someone on the de mailinglist who purposely modified four articles
and introduced a mistake in each of them. He also told us which articles he
modified and claimed that none of the mistakes was detected by now. I checked
three of the articles he was right with his claim.
In the german article about "consumer surplus" the error was there for about 9
(!) days before I removed the nonesense. In other articles the errors were
there for more than 9 days.
I agree with most of what you wrote, but I think it is a mistake to believe
that we have any kind of review system which is on par (wrt error
elimination) with a real peer review. At least my experience is that the
probability for finding a mistake in Wikipedia is by far higher than for
Britannica.
best regards,
Marco