Stevan, I'm guessing that you are making a ballpark estimate that the accuracy of the typical 'fact' in Wikipedia is around 50%, while the accuracy of a typical 'fact' in the peer-reviewed literature is around 99.95%.
I don't think either of us has published a peer-reviewed systematic analysis on this, but my sense is that, if anything, the numbers could be the other way around. The peer-reviewed original research literature is the bleeding edge of knowledge. As such, the original research literature inevitably contains myriad assertions that seem to be well supported at the time, but which turn out, on balance, to have been incorrect interpretations of the data or over-enthusiastic speculation. Wikipedia, via its strict 'no original research' policy, sets itself the more manageable (though still challenging) task of summarizing consensus opinion from a neutral PoV. As such, I think the facts/assertions it contains tend be much less disputed and subject to change than those in the original research literature. Obviously, it depends where in the vast resource you look. But certainly, you must be using a particularly weird subset of Wikipedia if you are finding 50% of it to be factually 'wrong' in any significant way. Given Wikipedia aims to document disputed facts from a neutral POV, by describing the dispute, it is clear that if you hold a strong absolute opinions about which side of the debate is correct, you are unlikely to find Wikipedia expressing direct agreement with you on that topic. That is by design. Not only that, in the case of opinions which are disputed, you not only get to see what one specific opinionated expert finally decided, but via the discussion pages and the history, you get to see a summary of the different strains of thinking that have led to the current consensus. Biology Direct's peer review model http://www.biology-direct.com/content/1/1/1 and the open peer review on the medical BMC-series journals are both designed to provide a degree of the same kind of transparency regarding differences of opinion. In contrast, in most of the peer reviewed literature you see only the final end product, and unfortunately despite the best efforts of authors, peer reviewers and editors, it is inevitable that sometimes that final end product will turn out to be wrong. Matt -----Original Message----- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: 16 May 2010 16:11 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Wikipedia, Open Access and Cognitive Virology On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 9:12 AM, Richard Poynder <[email protected]> wrote: > SH: But Wikipedia's frequent accuracy and usefulness does not (in my view) > counterbalance the fact that it is frequently unreliable and inaccurate too > ... > > RP: Is that not also a reasonable description of the totality of the > research corpus today, and a feature of the peer-reviewed literature that > will become increasingly apparent as more and more of the content published > in the world's 24,000 scholarly journals becomes OA? It's a reasonable description of both corpora -- if you ignore the difference between (say) 50% unreliability and .05% unreliability...
