[WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia in the news

[Stan Shebs]

Sheldon Rampton wrote:

> Stan Shebs wrote:
>
>> Jimbo is being a little too modest when he says that scholars haven't
>> picked articles for fact-checking - we have a number of scholars and
>> other authorities who are WPers, the articles in their areas get pretty
>> thoroughly fact-checked, and they watch those articles closely to see
>> that new errors don't get in. The only thing that hasn't happened yet
>> is a large-scale systematic review.
>
>
> But that wasn't the question. The article asked if Wikipedia had 
> tested its reliability by taking a number of RANDOMLY-SELECTED 
> articles and submitting them to scholars for fact-checking, to which 
> Jimbo admitted that they hadn't.

That's true, the WPing scholars are self-selected.

It occurs to me that an amusing future use of donations would be to
give $1-5k grants to various notables, for the purpose of reviewing
a small number of articles in their areas. Most would just do the work
(or assign to a grad student) and move on, but if 1 in 10 got hooked,
they could add a lot of valuable content.

Stan