Research talk:Committee/Areas of interest/Expert involvement

Preceding discussions

I promised to summarized the discussions which I (and also WereSpielCheckers) was involved some time ago on Strategy Wiki. Today I spent quite some time browsing the Strategy Wiki, and was not able to locate these discussions. I am not exactly sure what the reason is, may be the discussions are not there, may be there was not a single discussion but it was spread over liquid threads. Anyway, I think it could be useful if I just give my recollection which I would not be able to substantiate by any links. Everybody is obviously welcome to comment.--Yaroslav Blanter 16:56, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

The idea is that we have a number of articles over the projects (not only en.wp) which are specialized and require more preliminary knowledge that it can be expected from an average editor. In fact, some of these articles can be above the level of every editor - most of them are in sciences or humanities, where one indeed needs specialized education to contribute on a high level. Many of these articles have been created by amateurs who do not pretend to have the required level of knowledge.

On the other hand, real-life experts (most of them are academics) for a number of reasons usually have no time and no desire to contribute to Wikipedia by writing articles. It is unreasonable to expect that they would come and improve these specialized articles.

On the other hand, in real life these experts are typically heavily involved in all kind of peer-review processes, this is why it is natural to ask them also to peer-review Wikipedia articles in their research field. This peer-review would not be associated with editing, I think of it more like of a real peer-review with a list of issues to be revised.

• Projected advantages:

  Independent evaluation of the quality of articles and suggestions for improvement.

• Projected disadvantages:

  It is not clear how the review recommendations could be implemented (nobody is obliged to modify the article, and the Wikipedia editors may be not on the same level as the expert and misunderstand his/her recommendations);

  The experts who provide the review may look like "more equal" users;

  The experts may use the peer-review procedure to promote their work or POV.--Yaroslav Blanter 19:16, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

One of the areas of discussion was here, which has moved to Expert review. Personally I'm concerned that these proposals tend to assume the scenario that outside experts know more than wikipedians and can't be recruited to become wikipedians. That is probably true of many if not most subject areas. But there are also subjects where our existing editors are well qualified and I'm keen that any scheme along these lines avoids the scenario of a Wikipedian being overruled by a less qualified non-wikipedian. I haven't yet been to an Oxford meetup, but one of my friends who has was one of the two non-professors present. If we ask universities to provide expert reviews there is a real risk that some professors will delegate this rather than doing it themselves. WereSpielChequers 16:07, 2 February 2011 (UTC)