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

[Achal Prabhala]

Andrew Lih and Steven Walling and Timothy Messer-Kruse on NPR, 
discussing exactly this today:

http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=147261659&m=147261652


On Thursday 23 February 2012 08:11 AM, Robin McCain wrote:
> 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.
>>
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