Stevan,
I'm guessing that you are making a ballpark estimate that the accuracy
of the typical 'fact' in Wikipedia is around 50%, while the accuracy of
a typical 'fact' in the peer-reviewed literature is around 99.95%.
I don't think either of us has published a peer-reviewed systematic
analysis on this, but my sense is that, if anything, the numbers could
be the other way around.
The peer-reviewed original research literature is the bleeding edge of
knowledge. As such, the original research literature inevitably contains
myriad assertions that seem to be well supported at the time, but which
turn out, on balance, to have been incorrect interpretations of the data
or over-enthusiastic speculation.
Wikipedia, via its strict 'no original research' policy, sets itself the
more manageable (though still challenging) task of summarizing consensus
opinion from a neutral PoV. As such, I think the facts/assertions it
contains tend be much less disputed and subject to change than those in
the original research literature.
Obviously, it depends where in the vast resource you look. But
certainly, you must be using a particularly weird subset of Wikipedia if
you are finding 50% of it to be factually 'wrong' in any significant
way.
Given Wikipedia aims to document disputed facts from a neutral POV, by
describing the dispute, it is clear that if you hold a strong absolute
opinions about which side of the debate is correct, you are unlikely to
find Wikipedia expressing direct agreement with you on that topic. That
is by design.
Not only that, in the case of opinions which are disputed, you not only
get to see what one specific opinionated expert finally decided, but via
the discussion pages and the history, you get to see a summary of the
different strains of thinking that have led to the current consensus.
Biology Direct's peer review model
http://www.biology-direct.com/content/1/1/1
and the open peer review on the medical BMC-series journals are both
designed to provide a degree of the same kind of transparency regarding
differences of opinion. In contrast, in most of the peer reviewed
literature you see only the final end product, and unfortunately despite
the best efforts of authors, peer reviewers and editors, it is
inevitable that sometimes that final end product will turn out to be
wrong.
Matt
-----Original Message-----
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
[mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG] On
Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: 16 May 2010 16:11
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: Wikipedia, Open Access and Cognitive Virology
On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 9:12 AM, Richard Poynder
<richard.poynder_at_btinternet.com> wrote:
> SH: But Wikipedia's frequent accuracy and usefulness does not (in my
view)
> counterbalance the fact that it is frequently unreliable and
inaccurate too
> ...
>
> RP: Is that not also a reasonable description of the totality of the
> research corpus today, and a feature of the peer-reviewed literature
that
> will become increasingly apparent as more and more of the content
published
> in the world's 24,000 scholarly journals becomes OA?
It's a reasonable description of both corpora -- if you ignore the
difference between (say) 50% unreliability and .05% unreliability...
Received on Tue May 18 2010 - 17:48:29 BST