[WikiEN-l] Re: Accuracy Heuristics

[David Gerard]

On 09/06/04 09:26, Erik Moeller wrote:

> While I'm not too happy with what he did, I do hope that it breathes some  
> fresh life into the peer review discussion. The two core weaknesses of  
> Wikimedia are people acting like assholes and people who don't know what  
> they're talking about. If we systematically review and flag particular  
> revisions of articles, we can create a space within which they do not  
> exist.
> The validation system which is currently in CVS is only a rating system  
> and doesn't really help in sorting out individual facts. I'm afraid that  
> as a sole measure, it would contribute to the problem rather than solve  
> it, as people grow eager to push articles through quality control and  
> choose high ratings. These articles then attain a false notion of being  
> authoritative. Similarly, controversial articles might never gain such  
> status because some people don't like their content.


That would be the sort of thing that worried me about a rating system.


> There's an interesting project going on here:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Check
> Like the participants in this project, I've been thinking a bit about ways  
> to mark-up individual facts in articles. Essentially, I want to take a  
> text like
>   The inscription is approximately 15 metres high by 25 metres wide, and
>   100 metres up a cliff from an ancient road connecting the capitals of
>   Babylonia and Media (Babylon and Ecbatana).
> and mark up parts of it, like so:
>   ??The inscription is approximately 15 metres high by 25 metres wide??
> "??..??" means that this part of the article needs a source. Using CSS,  
> all passages marked with "??" could be highlighted or not, depending on  
> personal preferences.
> or like this:
>   ^+The inscription is approximately 15 metres high by 25 metres wide
>   [[Source:Behistun, p.84]]
> The part starting with "^+" would be referenced by the [[Source:]]. There  
> could be different markup for different quality citations, e.g. ^- for a  
> general encyclopedia or Google citation and ^= for a secondary source  
> citation.
> The [[Source:]] namespace could be a magic template-type namespace that  
> would load the bibliographical data from a page and insert it into a  
> footnote, so we don't have to keep inserting the same information.


Oh, I *do* like that. Has this been experimented with? Has a protocol/
language guru sanity-checked these additions to MediaWiki syntax?


> Of course these claims themselves could be faked. But together with  
> stable-revision flagging and a consensus-based peer review process  
> associated with every page, we could try to do for quality what we've done  
> for quantity. If you wanted to, you could view only articles that have  
> been reviewed and that are deemed 100% accurate.


This sounds absolutely wonderful :-)


- d.