[WikiEN-l] UIC Journal: Evaluating quality control of Wikipedia's feature[d] articles

[Carcharoth]

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 4:08 PM, Carl (CBM) <cbm.wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:

<snip>

> I would be much more interested in a system for expert refereeing than
> the present FA system.  To some extent, the current "peer review"
> process can already be used for this, but I don't expect to see a real
> change in this direction until the successor to Wikipedia.

I've always thought it strange that there is no real established
process for allowing submission of external peer reviews. There are
many articles where there are experts in the topic in question who are
quite approachable and could be asked to review the article. I suspect
this is not done so much for two reasons:

1) Sometimes the primary editor, editing pseudonymously, will
themselves be an expert in the field in question, and such approaches
could end up being awkward (I don't think this is a good enough reason
to avoid external reviews).

2) Sometimes the article will be savaged by external reviewers who
will know more about the breadth and depth of available sources, and
will (in many cases correctly) point out that the article (although
superficially good at first glance) doesn't really use the right
sources, or the existing sources in the right way.

3) Some external reviewers would fail to get what the article should
be aiming for, and will end up suggesting that the article is weighted
one way or another, and big arguments would ensue.

Of course, external reviews would massively improve the quality of
some articles, and would help identify the articles that were
genuinely our best work, but the problems above would need to be
addressed first.

Carcharoth