Measuring the quality of Wikipedia articles in general is an issue that Wikimedia UK is interested in looking at, though by means of automation rather than the gold-standard but much less scalable method of scholarly peer review.
Our early-stage plans for a large-scale IT project to provide automated quality-measuring tools for the community can be found at [1]. On the corresponding talk page my fellow trustee Simon Knight has recently posted the results of a literature survey that may be of some interest, although again he was focusing on automation rather than individual manual review. Almost all of the research has been done by academics, and very little seems to have found its way back to the Wikimedia space where it could be applied in practice. Michael [1] https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Technology_Committee/Project_requests/WikiRate_-_rating_Wikimedia On 7 May 2014, at 23:14, Andreas Kolbe <[email protected]> wrote: > Anne, there are really well-established systems of scholarly peer review. > There is no need to reinvent the wheel, or add distractions such as > infoboxes and other bells and whistles. > > I find it extraordinary that, after 13 years, a project designed to make > the sum of human knowledge available to humanity, with an annual budget of > $50 million, has no clue how to measure the quality of the content it is > providing, no apparent interest in doing so, and no apparent will to spend > money on it. > > For what it's worth, there was a recent external study of Wikipedia's > medical content that came to unflattering results: > > http://www.jaoa.org/content/114/5/368.full > > ---o0o--- > > Most Wikipedia articles for the 10 costliest conditions in the United > States contain errors compared with standard peer-reviewed sources. Health > care professionals, trainees, and patients should use caution when using > Wikipedia to answer questions regarding patient care. > > Our findings reinforce the idea that physicians and medical students who > currently use Wikipedia as a medical reference should be discouraged from > doing so because of the potential for errors. > > ---o0o--- > > > On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 10:59 PM, Risker <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On 7 May 2014 16:17, Anthony Cole <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> Could someone please point me to all the studies the WMF have conducted >>> into the reliability of Wikipedia's content? I'm particularly interested >> in >>> the medical content, but would also like to look over the others too. >>> Cheers. >>> >>> Anthony Cole <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Anthonyhcole> >>> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe>
