---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David Gerard <dgerard(a)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(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
On 8 May 2014 19:27, Anthony Cole <ahcoleecu(a)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