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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