[Foundation-l] Academic article review

[Pharos]

Well, one has to adopt a relative perspective.

My experience has been that, although certainly there is room for
expansion in scientific articles on specialty topics, Wikipedia
already has much better coverage of science than any print
encyclopedias, and most basic scientific subjects are treated fairly
completely.

The Evolution article is here typical:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution

In contrast, Wikipedia's coverage of the humanities is often inferior
to the better print encyclopedias, and even with very basic subjects.
This is perhaps because the humanities lend themselves less to easy
summary, as there is usually a great variety of scholarly opinion on
basic subjects, unlike in science.

The Tribe article is here typical:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribe

So I think particularly for basic humanities subjects (which are very
important to many of our readers), a pure review process by academic
experts would be of great value, and help to indirectly guide the
contributors to such articles along more productive paths.

Thanks,
Pharos

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 2:50 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod at mccme.ru> wrote:
>> But I do not believe that experts should have any special powers in
>> the editing of articles.
>>
>> Rather, I think they should be encouraged to act in a pure review
>> capacity, assessing the existing work of Wikipedians, and making
>> recommendations for improvement.  This might also be partially
>> implemented through flagged revs, and I could also envision a type of
>> button at the top of articles that says "see last version assessed by
>> an expert".
>>
>
> My point is actually that for majority of articles on science-ralated (and
> possibly some article on humanity-related, here I understand the situation
> less) there is nothing to review - they are either stubs or non-existent.
> Somebody needs to write them. You can consider this as a kind of review if
> you wish.
>
> Cheers
> Yaroslav
>
>
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