[Foundation-l] Subject: Re: The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia, (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions

[Robin McCain]

Well, I'm not an active academic, but I have been given to understand 
that the quality of the peer review process varies greatly. About 10 
years back, I was briefly involved in an attempt to develop an online 
peer reviewed publications infrastructure. This was one of our concerns 
- is it better to have 10 second tier subject matter experts vote on 
whether or not to publish an article or rely solely on the opinion of 
one first tier expert (who might bitterly detest the author of the work 
under scrutiny for reasons not at all connected with the quality of the 
article). Perhaps a better choice for people with subject matter 
expertise would be graduate students who have no axe to grind as yet.

It is the same old question of "who will watch the watchers" that has 
plagued every encyclopedic attempt in history.

So I'd rather have a qualified subject matter *generalist* review for 
content than someone who is a /specialist/ with completely _unrelated_ 
credentials. The generalist probably knows enough about the field in 
question to be able to spot inappropriate content than someone who has 
an inflated ego but knows nothing of the subject.

We strive for inclusiveness, but the Wikipedia US culture has become 
very exclusionary. Since this is a volunteer effort there is an attitude 
of "take what you can get" that leads to sloppy behaviors. It seems we 
need more effective and accessible training for everyone from readers to 
contributors and editors. There may be some such, but I haven't stumbled 
across it yet.

Is there already a core of training material that could be converted 
into some kind of online interactive instructional tool?

On 2/22/2012 6:04 PM, David Goodman wrote:
> I was one of the initial subject editors at Citizendium. One of  its
> key problems was the poor choice of subject matter experts. The
> selection of which people to trust was ultimately in the hands of  the
> founder, and he was unduly impressed by formal academic credentials
> without concerning himself about actual professional standing. But
> even had he a much closer understanding of the actual hierarchies in
> the academic world, the results would not have been much better,
> because  there is nobody of sufficient knowledge and authority across
> the fields of all of human activity to select the true experts.
>