[WikiEN-l] A future for Nupedia?

[Poor, Edmund W]

We already have the technical means to indicate that an article has
passed peer review by people with serious academic credentials. This was
discussed at the First Annual English Wikipedia Meeting this summer in
Boston.

Magnus Manke even made a working copy of the software to support this
plan, and Larry Sanger described in detail how it could work (Sanger
called it "sifter").

Basically, reviewers with academic credentials can add a mark (or
"flag") to a specific version of an article, indicating that they
approve of it.

Readers can see these marks. For example, they can see that Prof. Chaim
Tahm approved version #382 of [[History of Israel]].

Importantly, any change at all to a reviewed article DOES NOT carry the
flag of approval forward! Let's explore what this means:

* the current version will often not be "peer reviewed"
* user has the option of going back to the "peer reviewed" version
** Some users might want to set their Wikipedia browsing options to show
"only the peer reviewed version" of articles
* when viewing a version which is "peer reviewed" (but is not the latest
version) a notice is displayed pointing out that there are subsequent
versions.
* Clicking "Edit This Article" when viewing an old "peer reviewed"
version brings up the standard "You are editing an old version" warning.

We might decide that a hard-copy or DVD of Wikipedia would contain:
(a) only the peer-reviewed version of articles (when available); or,
(b) only the latest version; or,
(c) both the peer-reviewed and latest versions 

I realize there are unresolved questions of identifying reviewers:

1. Who is a "qualified" academic?
2. How can we be sure that someone logging in to Wikipedia is "really"
the person they say they are? (We don't want a troll pretending to be
Stephen Hawking and reviewing a physics article.)

But I think these questions are resolvable. We might establish a
Credentials Committee, who could e-mail and/or talk to prospective
reviewers on the phone. If I look up "Professor Warren Pease" at
Columbia University, by calling the school's main switchboard and asking
for the History Department, isn't that good enough? If the guy who
answers the phone says he's Professor Pease, that's good enough for me. 

Ed Poor

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Robert [mailto:rkscience100 at yahoo.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, September 07, 2004 7:45 PM
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] A future for Nupedia?
> 
> 
> >>> Having an article only gives the impression to readers
> >>> that we tolerate junk.
> 
> >> Which is good.  If we give the impression to readers
> >> that we tolerate only full-grown complete articles,
> >> we will detract contributors who are perhaps not quite
> >> as good a writer as they would like to be.
> 
> > Exactly. This is why Nupedia failed.
> 
> 
> That may be one of the reasons why the early attempt at
> Nupedia failed, but the idea behind Nupedia still lives. 
> Haven't many of us discussed some form of stable Wikipedia 
> 1.0, which has some form of peer-review above the usual? 
> And perhaps Nupedia was a bit premature, as we were asking 
> volunteers to start from zero.
> 
> Wikipedia has grown immensely in the last few years. The
> number of people with serious academic credentials who have 
> some favorable opinion of it has probably grown by an order 
> of magnitude as well. Now that a huge amount of open-source 
> material is already available here, it should be easier to 
> re-kindle the Nupedia project today.  The idea would be much 
> more attractive this time around, as (on many
> subjects) people wouldn't have to start from scratch. 
> Contributors could take a series of Wikipedia articles (if 
> they wished) and use this text as a launching pad for their own work.
> 
> Like Larry Sanger, I am still concerned about the long-term 
> prestige of Wikipedia. As long as many contributors don't 
> reference their claims, and don't rely on published 
> authorities (at least to some extent), then many people in 
> academic won't take our articles seriously. But using 
> Wikipedia as an open-source feeder for growing Nupedia 
> articles leverages everyone's efforts; the whole could be 
> much greater than the sum of its parts.
> 
> Nupedia might not have worked then. But one or two years
> from now it might be the perfect idea.
> 
> Robert (RK)
> 
> 
> =====
> I'm astounded by people who want to "know" the universe when 
> it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown. - Woody Allen
> 
> 
> 		
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