As Phoebe and (I think) Anne point out, there are many relevant aspects of quality. Readability, pertinence, neutrality, concision and comprehensiveness are all important factors but, when it comes to safety and efficacy claims in our medical articles, for me they pale into insignificance beside that other element of quality: veracity.
I agree with those above who highlight the flaws in the current scholarly peer-review process. If enWikipedia is to embrace scholarly review (and we should) we need to confront and address the well-known problems with peer review in today's scholarship.
Whether we use scholars to assess the veracity, pertinence, comprehensiveness and neutrality of our articles as part of a self-assessment process, or as a service to our readers, I believe the quality of our scholarly review must be beyond reproach.
Above I mention the journal Open Medicine has peer-reviewed a version of Wikipedia's "Dengue fever" thanks to the tireless efforts of Doc James and others (not me). I see this as a significant threshold. Once that article is published in the journal, James will be adding a clickable icon to the top of the current Wikipedia version, linking the reader to the PubMed abstract (or PubMed Central full version - I'm not sure which).
I know nothing about Open Medicine's editorial or review processes, though. As a start - to break this new ground - I am delighted to have this go forward as it is. But can we bend our minds now - or soon - to the question of whose reviewed versions should we be linking to. If the Journal of the New Zealand Acupuncture Society reviews and publishes a version of our "Acupuncture" article, do we link to it at the top of the article? If the Lancet - publishers of Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent MMR vaccine-autism-collitis paper overcomes its issues with CC-BY-SA and reviews and publishes a version of "Cancer", do we link to it?
I have a lot more to say on this issue but would like to hear some civil, thoughtful responses to the above before ploughing ahead. Let me say again, to be very clear, I support linking to the reviewed version of "Dengue fever". It is after all virtually identical to Wikipedia's current version, and any differences in the current version have not had the added filter of expert eyse from the scholarly-review process. But it is time for us to start thinking carefully and talking amongst ourselves about the question of scholarly review.
Anthony Cole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Anthonyhcole
Anthony Cole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Anthonyhcole
On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 1:56 AM, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 10:13 AM, edward edward@logicmuseum.com wrote:
On 08/05/2014 17:58, geni wrote:
So while it is unlikely that a published journal article would be a
complete hoax
This is because they have a robust review process, which Wikipedia doesn't. Enough said.
Geni did say "unlikely", not "it never happens":
http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-paper...
By which I which I don't mean to say most literature is useless or a fraud: it's not! But it's also not a 100% black or white picture.
-- phoebe
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