Wikipedia talk:Forum for Encyclopedic Standards archive (approval mechanisms)

"Approval" mechanisms

"Reviewed" articles draft proposal

Advantages:

• Simple and quick. This could be implemented and useful within an hour of its adoption.
• Takes best-of-both-worlds approach to wiki nature and any standing of experts.

Outline:

1. Any registered user could review any article.
2. There would be a category and list of reviewed articles.
3. The list would indicate which version of an article was reviewed by each reviewer.
4. Reviews on the list would be no more than a paragraph long.

Options:

1. Detailed reviews could be written and linked to from the list.
2. Reviewers who chose to could list themselves and a paragraph about any relevant qualifications or limitations on a list of reviewers.
3. Reviewers should at least indicate if they have worked on the article.
4. We could have a list of articles for which a review is desired, or use the current peer review page.
5. We could choose a set of suggested levels or other indicators (such as “acceptable,” “weak,” “comprehensive,” etc.).

Maurreen 21:04, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

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Interim measure

Maybe it would be helpful to think of my proposal for article reviews as an interim measure. It isn't intended to be perfect by any means.

It is intended to give readers some measure of the quality of any given article or article version.

It is something that could very easily be produced and used while something better is discussed, decided and developed. It does not preclude any other system. It can include, or not include, a minimum standard for Wikipedia articles, which would need to be developed.

It could be one of any number of tools that work toward an eventual paper or "release" version. Maurreen 09:34, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Editorial board(s)

My thought on this is that there is an immediate problem with 'Any registered user could review any article'. There's no problem with having anyone review an article - however to improve the credibility and reliability of Wikipedia, I think that we (unfortunately) need a link to the 'outside world' where people have real names and qualifications, rather than 'karma' built up under a nom-de-plume. For articles' credibility to be increased, someone's, or some people's, reputation needs to be on the line. My thoughts are that a properly constituted editorial board needs to approve (and possibly modify) articles. As I've mentioned elsewhere, there could (and in my view should) be multiple competing boards aiming to set their seal upon particular article versions. For example, one such board could be a set of academics in a particular subject whose names are known, who have a publishing record in peer-reviewed journals, and have an academic reputation. This does not preclude a self selected group of people setting up their own board under noms-de-plume and producing a Wikireputation based set of approvals. Users would have the choice of using either or both or neither board's seals of approval (article tags) as a filter into Wikipedia. WLD 21:48, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)

This idea has potential. Maurreen 14:03, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Standards and collective review

Maurreen, are you talking about working toward Wikipedia 1.0? I could see the sense of reviewing in advance of that; but if so we need a minimum standard for Wikipedia articles for publication on a CD/DVD. I think that establishing that minimum standard comes first.

I also think we need a more collective review mechanism - individual reviewing standards are too subjective and won't build too anything constructive without a software solution to support them. If we are going to do this without a software solution, then I think we should build on FAC. We should be able to process far more articles because the standard would inevitably be much lower. If we set up such a process it would mean that x number of articles could be flagged as approved by whatever mechanism is eventually developed in the software. :ChrisG 20:27, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

ChrisG's template and process

Thinking some more about Maurreen's proposal it occurred to me that with the combination of templates and categories we could set up a voting system to approve articles. Consider this template (I used subst to create the text, e.g. {{subst:ChrisGtest}} ):

If you look to the bottom of the screen this template categorises the article as a candidate for Wikipedia 0.1 and also by the current day, month and year (uses variables so need to update). This means anybody wishing to vote on articles need only check the appropriate category for articles. They could click the links to the talk page of the articles they are interested in. The talk page of the article would give the link to the specific version and the votes so far; after checking the article the person could vote as they see fit.

As time passes, the articles listed as candidates will dwindle as they are approved or rejected. The fact the candidates are categorised by date would mean we know when to close the vote of any articles that have been sitting in candidate status for too long.

Rejected articles would have the candidate category removed. Successful articles would be given a Wikipedia 0.1 category instead, again identified by the date of the version approved. In addition the specific version of the article should be listed somewhere as approved on that date, i.e Wikipedia: Approved 0.1/1 Dec 2004.

I realize we don't have a consensus on how to approve articles, largely I think because some people are talking about approving top quality articles and others are talking about minimum standards for the CD/DVD editions; but this is a method which we could apply now without changes to the software, which would scale and would thus be suitable for either purpose.

ChrisG 01:10, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Endorsement idea

We might be able to develop a system by which anyone could endorse a particular version of an article; presumably groups could form whose endorsement would carry some weight. The mechanism would be one "reader" approval equals point one(0.1) an "editor" would rank one point (1) an "editing librarian" would rank one to ten (1 - 10) an admin would rank 10 to eleven (10 - 11), a group could be assigned a similarly weighted scoring rank, i.e. an opinion offered editorially by "The Royal College of Physicians & Surgeons" might rank one way or the other compared to a select group of its Alumni. Deriving from this an articles approval-rating would be a function of its veracity as regards the opinion of the majority of its' readers. an entry in wikipedia would have (available for review) an articles position relevant to all other articles. (Idea from anon, Maurreen moved from project page.)

The idea of open endorsement has merit, but this outline seeems very complicated. Maurreen 06:13, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)