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 <risker...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 7 May 2014 16:17, Anthony Cole <ahcole...@gmail.com> 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> > > > > > I've often thought about this myself, and I'm fairly certain the WMF has > never done any serious assessment of article quality. Different projects > have done so on their own, through content auditing processes and the > development of Wikipedia 1.0, but that affects a minority of articles. > There are some real challenges in coming up with workable metrics. > > For example - Is a stub article inaccurate, incomplete, or really contains > all the information it's likely ever going to get? > > How does one assess the accuracy of articles where there are multiple > sources that we'd consider reliable, but who provide contradictory > information on a topic? That would include, for example, all the ongoing > boundary issues involving multiple countries, the assessment of historical > impact of certain events or persons, and certain scientific topics where > new claims and reports happen fairly frequently and may or may not have > been reproduced. There may also be geographic or cultural factors that > affect the quality of an article, or the perceived notability of a subject, > and challenges dealing with cross-language reference sources. > > Many of the metrics used for determining "quality" in audited articles on > English Wikipedia have very little to do with the actual quality of the > article. From the perspective of providing good information, a lot of > Manual of Style practices are nice but not required. Certain accessibility > standards (alt text for images, media positioning so as not to adversely > affect screen-readers) are not quality metrics, strictly speaking; they're > *accessibility* standards. There remains a huge running debate about > whether or not infoboxes should be required, what information should be in > them, how to deal with controversial or complex information in infoboxes, > etc. > > So I suppose the first step would be in determining what metrics should be > included in a quality assessment of a project. > > Risker/Anne > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> > _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
