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