Sheldon Rampton wrote:
Stan Shebs wrote:
Jimbo is being a little too modest when he says
that scholars haven't
picked articles for fact-checking - we have a number of scholars and
other authorities who are WPers, the articles in their areas get pretty
thoroughly fact-checked, and they watch those articles closely to see
that new errors don't get in. The only thing that hasn't happened yet
is a large-scale systematic review.
But that wasn't the question. The article asked if Wikipedia had
tested its reliability by taking a number of RANDOMLY-SELECTED
articles and submitting them to scholars for fact-checking, to which
Jimbo admitted that they hadn't.
That's true, the WPing scholars are self-selected.
It occurs to me that an amusing future use of donations would be to
give $1-5k grants to various notables, for the purpose of reviewing
a small number of articles in their areas. Most would just do the work
(or assign to a grad student) and move on, but if 1 in 10 got hooked,
they could add a lot of valuable content.
Stan