[Foundation-l] Subject: Re: The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia, (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions

[Robin McCain]

I think you have inadvertently hit upon something essential.

Content has some relative value. Someone has always had to put energy 
into creating content. More importantly for our current discussion, 
someone has always had to make a decision to invest in the REPRODUCTION 
of content. Printing (on paper) is historically an expensive process. 
Publishers could not afford to waste time, materials & equipment on 
content of questionable value. So submitted content was always subjected 
to some sort of review process to weed out the trivial content. Someone 
made a value judgement. Historically that person(s) had a vested 
interest in the subject of that content. Whether peer reviewed or 
evaluated by a subject matter expert - printed matter has always had 
some sort of editorial process.

That isn't to say we should necessarily trust the motives of that 
editorial process. Propaganda is by its very nature NOT objective. But 
there is a big difference between an article written for a local 
entertainment or business daily and an advertisement in that 
publication.  For example: a theatrical publication pays for an 
advertisement (where they get to say what they will) - but a 
'''review''' by that same publication is the result of editorial control 
and is trusted as far more objective by the reader.

Another example - the Reader's Digest - a publication trusted by 
millions, has now become the advertising platform of choice for the 
pharmaceutical industry. Every issue has multipage ads for expensive new 
drugs. The layouts of these ads make them LOOK authoritative - as though 
the staff of RD advocated their use. So the weight of RD remains about 
the same, though actual content of value is less, and the subscriber 
pays for the increased bulk mail costs.

So - by a roundabout we come to the meat of the content issue.

The reason we tend to trust printed material in general is because it is 
perceived to have been through some editorial value judgement.

Most of the editing that is done in any publication process has noting 
to do with the value of the content - it is ERROR CORRECTION. Only a 
subject matter expert is qualified to do editing that is a VALUE JEDGEMENT.

For Wikipedia to combine the two functions in an "editor" is not 
productive.  We need a *two tiered* editorial process at work to become 
more efficient. If there are not enough subject matter experts - more 
need to be recruited. /Otherwise the trust level of the publication will 
suffer./ Presumably the various portals are organized enough that they 
can serve as a funnel for value judgements - but the general editorial 
volunteers have to learn to refer the value judgements to the 
specialists in these portals and confine themselves to error correction. 
This also means that we can then attract more subject matter specialists 
as they do not have to deal with the error correction task and their 
decisions will have more prestiege. (It should be a BIG plus for a 
professor to be able to say that (s)he has been a subject matter expert 
editor on the xxx portal of Wikipedia for yyy years on their CV)

On 2/22/2012 5:08 AM, foundation-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
> Well actually, we use newspaper sources very frequently, as well as
> non-scholarly (and therefore non-peer-reviewed) books, so in fact, we
> rely on*printing*  (or to put it more kindly, publishing) as a signal
> for peer-review, not peer-review itself. In my opinion, this is a poor
> signal.