On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 8:12 AM, geni <[email protected]> wrote: > On 8 May 2014 01:00, Andreas Kolbe <[email protected]> wrote: > > > As for study design, I'd suggest you begin with a *random* sample of > > frequently-viewed Wikipedia articles in a given topic area (e.g. those > > within the purview of WikiProject Medicine), have them assessed by an > > independent panel of academic experts, and let them publish their > results. > > > > > No control, no calibration. Without those you can't really be sure what > you've measured. While academic attitudes to Wikipedia may be of some > interest they are not a proxy for quality. >
Yes Geni, absolutely. If I give Wikipedia's article on diabetes to three acknowledged experts on diabetes for a detailed review, and they tell me at the end of it that it is a wonderful, up-to-date and accurate article – or they tell me that it contains numerous errors of fact – I won't have learned anything. :) Incidentally, speaking of diabetes, one of the more striking hoaxes in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wikipedia is "glucojasinogen". It lasted 4.5 years and entered several academic sources that copied a section of the Wikipedia article, before someone discovered that there was no such thing. One thing I would say is that if Wikipedia articles were to be compared against articles from another source, they should have roughly the same length. It's not fair to compare a 4,000-word article from Wikipedia against a 500-word article from Britannica. Other than that, I think we could leave the study design to those who do this sort of stuff for a living. It's really not something you and I have to work out here on a mailing list. _______________________________________________ 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>
