On 7 May 2014 22:24, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 2:41 AM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
I think perhaps there is a lack of research into the extent of research already being done by independent, qualified third parties. Several examples are provided in the references of the study you posted, Andreas. For example, this one in the Journal of Oncology Practice[1] compares specific Wikipedia articles for patient-oriented cancer information
against
the professionally edited PDQ database. It appears that the two were comparable in most areas, except for readability, where the PDQ database was considered significantly more readable. Now, again, this is a small study and it has not been reproduced; however, it took me minutes to find more information on the very subject you're interested in, created by completely independent bodies who have "no pony in the race". There did seem to be a fair number of studies related to medical topics. Now if
only
we could learn from them - especially on the readability point, which I think really is a very serious issue. Wikipedia isn't really intended to educate physicians about medical topics, it's intended to be a general reference for non-specialists.
Very few people are going to make life-and-death decisions based on our math or physics topic areas, but I'll lay odds that any study would find
a
significant readability issue with both of them, as well.
Risker/Anne
In the study you reference, Anne, reviewers spent all of 18 minutes on each article. The readability analysis was done by automation.
Yes, of course readability analysis is done by automation. I've yet to find a consistent readability assessment that doesn't use automation. It's not an area where subjectivity is particularly useful.
And that was an average of 18 minutes per article, i.e., 36 minutes: 18 minutes for the WP article and 18 minutes for the PDQ article. How long do you really think it should take? I read several of the articles in under 5 minutes on each site. Of course, the reviewers wouldn't need to look up the definitions of a lot of the terms that lay people would need to look at, because they were already professionally educated in the topic area, so that would significantly reduce the amount of time required to assess the article.
Andreas, you seem to have pre-determined that Wikipedia's medical articles are all terrible and riddled with errors. Realistically, they're amongst the most likely to receive professional editing and review - Wikiproject Medicine does a much better job than people are willing to credit them. The biggest weakness to the articles - and I've heard this from many people who read them - is that they're written at too high a level to be really accessible to lay people. I thought the point that the study made about the benefit of linking to an "English" dictionary definition of complex terms rather than to another highly technical Wikipedia article was a very good one, for example. We could learn from these studies.
Indeed, many science articles are mainly written by professionals in the field (I noted math and physics earlier, but chemistry and of course a large number of computer articles are also written by professionals). The biggest challenge for these subjects is to write them in an accessible way. Note, I said "science" - alternative medicine, history, geopolitical and "soft science" articles are much more problematic.
Risker/Anne