---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com Date: Thu, May 8, 2014 at 12:15 PM Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
On 8 May 2014 19:27, Anthony Cole ahcoleecu@gmail.com wrote:
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.
While acknowledging the likely truth of the flaws in scientific knowledge production as it stands (single studies in medicine being literally useless, as 80% are actually wrong) ... I think you'll have a bit of an uphill battle attempting to enforce stronger standards in Wikipedia than exist in the field itself. We could go to requiring all medical sourced to be Cochrane-level studies of studies of studies,
That actually is the current best practice for medical articles in English, I believe, and I think it's a good one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:MEDRS
Sourcing to reviews when possible is particularly relevant for a field (like medicine) that has a well-established tradition of conducting and publishing systematic reviews -- but I find it a useful practice in lots of areas, on the theory that reviews are generally more helpful for someone trying to find out more about a topic.
Anthony: I hear you about veracity being particularly important in medical articles; and I don't mean to get us too far in the weeds about what quality means -- there's lots to do on lots of articles that I think would be pretty obvious quality improvement, including straight-up fact-checking.
-- phoebe