Re: [Foundation-l] Academic article review
Pharos wrote: My experience has been that, although certainly there is room for expansion in scientific articles on specialty topics, Wikipedia already has much better coverage of science than any print encyclopedias, and most basic scientific subjects are treated fairly completely. In contrast, Wikipedia's coverage of the humanities is often inferior to the better print encyclopedias, and even with very basic subjects. This is perhaps because the humanities lend themselves less to easy summary, as there is usually a great variety of scholarly opinion on basic subjects, unlike in science. I don't think that's actually true. I think some areas, like evolution that you mentioned, are covered reasonably well, because there are enough Wikipedians who have an interest in and reasonably decent knowledge of the field to write a good article, and perhaps more importantly to fend off non-good contributions or edits to the article. In many areas of science this is not true. Oddly for a computer encyclopedia, our computer science articles are largely quite poor, except in pop computing types of articles like discussions of the Linux kernel or tech companies, which are decent. My personal area of professional expertise is artificial intelligence, and our articles on *that* subject are so bad that I'm embarrassed to try to introduce academics in my field to Wikipedia, since I know they'll probably look those articles up first and be turned off by the AI-kookiness that pervades them. I think if the humanities on average are worse than the sciences on average, it's mostly down to who we have as contributors versus don't. Of course, complex fields with a variety of scholarly opinion are harder to cover, but we cover them fairly well where we have a lot of dedicated contributors with detailed knowledge of all those opinions, and badly in areas where we don't, or where they're outnumbered by people who don't really know what they're talking about. -Mark ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Academic article review
Pharos wrote: In contrast, Wikipedia's coverage of the humanities is often inferior to the better print encyclopedias, and even with very basic subjects. This is perhaps because the humanities lend themselves less to easy summary, as there is usually a great variety of scholarly opinion on basic subjects, unlike in science. The Tribe article is here typical: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribe Not that I necessarily disagree with your conclusions, but I wouldn't cite Tribe as a typical subject in the humanities, as it's more in the realm of the social sciences. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Academic article review (was:Re: Cabal?)
If we were doing such a thing: 1. we wouldn't be paying anyone 2. we'd be shouting it from the rooftops. Nice idea, actually. Anyone feel they could put together a serious programme to recruit academics to such a cause? (changed subject as this is an interesting discussion) I was thinking about this as well recently and yes, Thomas, I agree, this is something that could coordinated or at least supported by chapters, many of which have good connections to local universities. Michael Just to remind that I am a university professor and that I posted my thoughts a while ago on meta http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Yaroslav_Blanter/Temp17 So far, nobody showed any interest. Cheers Yaroslav ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Academic article review
One of your points there was: 6. The current experience (or at least my current experience) is not really encouraging. The real top researchers just plainly have no time to edit articles, nor are they really interested. Those who come are mostly interested in editing article about themselves or about their immediate research, and view this as a kind of free PR. The same might be said of articles about Wikipedia. If you don't get any responses within 48 hours you are unlikely to get any at all. I see one response there but that is most likely because of the message to which I am responding. Your comments are on Temp17 of what is probably a much longer series of personal subpages. There is very likelihood that anyone will ever see it, let alone respond. Ec Actually, I only have Temp17, and I was preparing it in my personal space (so far provided links to several users), but on one occasion a couple of months ago I posted it in this mailing list. It there is any interest, I will obviously move it to the general meta namespace. I did not yet check the comments, will do now. Cheers Yaroslav ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Academic article review
But I do not believe that experts should have any special powers in the editing of articles. Rather, I think they should be encouraged to act in a pure review capacity, assessing the existing work of Wikipedians, and making recommendations for improvement. This might also be partially implemented through flagged revs, and I could also envision a type of button at the top of articles that says see last version assessed by an expert. My point is actually that for majority of articles on science-ralated (and possibly some article on humanity-related, here I understand the situation less) there is nothing to review - they are either stubs or non-existent. Somebody needs to write them. You can consider this as a kind of review if you wish. Cheers Yaroslav ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Academic article review (was:Re: Cabal?)
On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 8:52 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/3/2 Chris Down neuro.wikipe...@googlemail.com: Ipatrol has just came on IRC claiming that he has been told that the WMF is hiring people to validate articles, and that the foundation is doing it in secret by using thousands of IPs and academics. He claims that the WMF has contracted colleges all across the US have been recruiting academics to validate articles, and states that admins are involved in this 'cabal', or whatever. o_0 If we were doing such a thing: 1. we wouldn't be paying anyone 2. we'd be shouting it from the rooftops. Nice idea, actually. Anyone feel they could put together a serious programme to recruit academics to such a cause? (changed subject as this is an interesting discussion) I was thinking about this as well recently and yes, Thomas, I agree, this is something that could coordinated or at least supported by chapters, many of which have good connections to local universities. Michael -- Michael Bimmler mbimm...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
