I guess you have heard of the recently launched Citizendium. See "New Citizendium to correct Wikipedia's wrongs?" at http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060919-7775.html How does your idea relates to Citizendium? Citizendium is at http://citizendium.org/ The Citizendium Project The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a "citizens' compendium of everything," will be an experimental new wiki project that combines public participation with gentle expert guidance. It will begin life as a "progressive fork" of Wikipedia. But we expect it to take on a life of its own and, perhaps, to become the flagship of a new set of responsibly-managed free knowledge projects. We will avoid calling it an "encyclopedia," because there will probably always be articles in the resource that have not been vouched for in any sense. We believe a fork is necessary, and justified, both to allow regular people a place to work under the direction of experts, and in which personal accountability--including the use of real names--is expected. In short, we want to create a responsible community and a good global citizen. P. On 9/21/06, Alex Halavais <halavais@gmail.com> wrote:
Many people dismiss Wikipedia out of hand as a trusted source, precisely because it is written and edited by "anybody." This differs, they suggest, from a newspaper, which is "fact checked," or from an academic paper, which is "peer reviewed." Over the last two years, I have chatted with a number of people about the possibility of peer reviewing Wikipedia "from the outside." At Wikimania, a number of proposals were made--some of which are already under way--to make Wikipedia both a more credible and a more accurate source of information. The two, while complementary, are not necessarily identical.
What I would like to do is assemble an editorial board of recognized experts in Internet Studies, Computer-Mediated Communication, and Human-Computer Interaction who would go through the process of finding appropriate peer reviewers and certifying particular versions of Wikipedia articles as being peer-reviewed. This would provide the reader with an additional indication that the work is of high quality and accurate.
To do this, we need to assemble a group of people who have some level of recognition in the field, and who are willing to devote a small amount of time to helping to select a core set of articles and oversee the review process. While we will be looking at a number of ways to make this process more technologically easy, the key issue here is to find a group of people willing to invest a little time and their reputations in an effort to make Wikipedia a more trusted source.
If you are interested in chatting a bit more about the project, drop me a note. If you will be in Brisbane for the Internet Research, perhaps we can discuss the possibilities over lunch on Thursday.
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