Wikipedia edit

  1. Authority and Authorship in a 21st-Century Encyclopaedia and a ‘Very Mysterious Foundation’
  2. Becoming Wikipedian: transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia
  3. Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia
  4. Cyberchiefs: autonomy and authority in online tribes
  5. Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia's Contributor List
  6. Explaining quality in Internet collective goods: Zealots and good samaritans in the case of Wikipedia
  7. Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World
  8. Governance, organization, and democracy on the Internet: The iron law and the evolution of Wikipedia
  9. Imagining the Wikipedia community: What do Wikipedia authors mean when they write about their 'community'?
  10. Laboratories of Oligarchy? How The Iron Law Extends to Peer Production
  11. Naturally emerging regulation and the danger of delegitimizing conventional leadership: Drawing on the example of Wikipedia
  12. On the inequality of contributions to Wikipedia
  13. Six Pixels of Separation
  14. Social Power in International Politics
  15. Standing on the Sun
  16. Taking up the mop: identifying future Wikipedia administrators
  17. The Discourse of Blogs and Wikis
  18. The Inclusionist: Nicholson Baker's Art of Preservation
  19. The Wisdom of Polarised Crowds
  20. Volunteers in Wikipedia: Why the community matters'
  21. Wikipedians are born, not made: a study of power editors on Wikipedia
  22. Wikipedia: A New Community of Practice?
  23. Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age
  24. WP:THREATENING2MEN: Misogynist Infopolitics and the Hegemony of the Asshole Consensus on English Wikipedia
  25. The Limits of Volunteerism and the Gatekeepers of Team Encarta (2019)
  26. Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia
  27. A Large Scale Study of Reader Interactions with Images on Wikipedia

Meta-analysis and systematic reviews edit

Facto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019
 

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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What is a systematic review?

Systematic reviews are basic building blocks of evidence-based medicine, surveys of existing literature devoted typically to a definite question that aim to bring out scientific conclusions. They are principled in a way Wikipedians can appreciate, taking a critical view of their sources.

 
PRISMA flow diagram for a systematic review

Ben Goldacre in 2014 wrote (link below) "[...] : the "information architecture" of evidence based medicine (if you can tolerate such a phrase) is a chaotic, ad hoc, poorly connected ecosystem of legacy projects. In some respects the whole show is still run on paper, like it's the 19th century." Is there a Wikidatan in the house? Wouldn't some machine-readable content that is structured data help?

Most likely it would, but the arcana of systematic reviews and how they add value would still need formal handling. The PRISMA standard dates from 2009, with an update started in 2018. The concerns there include the corpus of papers used: how selected and filtered? Now that Wikidata has a 20.9 million item bibliography, one can at least pose questions. Each systematic review is a tagging opportunity for a bibliography. Could that tagging be reproduced by a query, in principle? Can it even be second-guessed by a query (i.e. simulated by a protocol which translates into SPARQL)? Homing in on the arcana, do the inclusion and filtering criteria translate into metadata? At some level they must, but are these metadata explicitly expressed in the articles themselves? The answer to that is surely "no" at this point, but can TDM find them? Again "no", right now. Automatic identification doesn't just happen.

Actually these questions lack originality. It should be noted though that WP:MEDRS, the reliable sources guideline used here for health information, hinges on the assumption that the usefully systematic reviews of biomedical literature can be recognised. Its nutshell summary, normally the part of a guideline with the highest density of common sense, allows literature reviews in general validity, but WP:MEDASSESS qualifies that indication heavily. Process wonkery about systematic reviews definitely has merit.

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Sources edit

  1. Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting