[WikiEN-l] OT: Peer review gone awry - "The Case of M. S. El Naschie"

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 2:40 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> (At any rate, someone knowledgable might want to check over our own
> relevant math/physics articles and make sure there's nothing fishy
> there).

A fair bit of the material in question is patent nonsense of the
highest degree, arguably no better than the output of a fairly
unsophisticated nonsense paper generator.

I think the event is more of a statement about how often works in
specialist publications go pretty much totally unread.

I find it rather depressing:

The popular press frequently prints grievous untruths, statements of
uncontested falsehood apparent to anyone with expertise on the subject
matter, and they infrequently correct themselves even though the
errors are widely seen, known, and discussed... unless the error
becomes a scandal of its own.  (A recent example: The overwhelming
majority of the major media in their depiction suicide of Megan Meier
describe the activities of Lori Drew in a manner which is completely
at odds with the facts uncontested by both the prosecution and the
defence in the trial; Of course, Wikipedia currently repeats these
'verifiable' falsehoods, citing mass media sources which show no
evidence of their investigation, sources which are likely just
regurgitating older inaccurate stories without validation, or even
Wikipedia).

The world knows the mass media sources are of full of errors but they
are not corrected.

And on the flip side, the niche publications and scientific journals
which gain their value almost exclusively from their reputation as
reliable sources apparently do not have sufficient readership to even
reliably detect patent nonsense not so far more advanced than
Wikipedia "penis!" vandalism.

The reality outside of Wikipedia is not ours to change. But how can we
avoid contributing to these problems?