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

[David Goodman]

That reviews might express individual eccentric views, or be involved
in scholarly quarrels, is inevitable to the nature of reviewing.

The best method might be that of multiple outside external
reviews--external in this sense meaning someone who has not
contributed to the article, as is done in some social science
journals. I would imagine them as signed (anyone who wishes to
contribute anonymously can continue to do so) and on individual
subpages in article space. They could conceivably be done o a separate
project and linked--it would not even have to be a WMF project (and
thus anyone could start organizing--or actually doing it--whenever
they liked). All we'd need to do is regard it as complementary, not
hostile.

In the past, I doubt that many experts 5 years ago would have thought
it worthwhile to do such reviews, but the importance of Wikipedia  has
changed substantially. One does not get great credit for a review in
the academic world, but one does get a little--and one shows oneself
an expert in front of other experts.

David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG



On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 11:30 AM, Carcharoth
<carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
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