Peer Reviewing Wikipedia

One of the most often heard responses to complaints about incorrect information in Wikipedia is “Stop complaining and fix it.” But many of those who would be willing to fix it are turned off because Wikipedia can be anti-expert with Byzantine rules of conduct that favor the rude and determined. Fixing Wikipedia doesn’t work if your contributions are removed in an edit war. Some people thrive on that kind of contest, but most academics prefer a review by their peers and, when faced with the reality of Wikipedia, choose to opt out.

But the Wikipedia vs. peer review dichotomy is a false one. Since the material on Wikipedia is available through the GNU Free Document License, anyone is free to take any fraction of Wikipedia behind a peer review firewall as long as the peer-reviewed material is itself made available through the GNU FDL. Trying to peer review the several million Wikipedia articles is a Herculean task but peer reviewing the fewer than 100 Wikipedia articles on mass spectrometry is quite reasonable, especially if you are familiar with the Mediawiki software.

I have been using Mediawiki for a few years now and serve my group webpage and MS Terms site with the software. It was fairly easy to create a Mass Spectrometry Wiki and pull the pages from the Wikipedia mass spectrometry category into it. Mediawiki is set up for interwiki links, so it is trivial to direct non-mass spectrometry links from the articles out to Wikipedia. Since I have the administrator password, I am now the Benevolent Dictator of the pages in the Mass Spectrometry Wiki. Since I am pro-expert and anti-anonymous editing, I have the wiki set up so that only logged-in users can edit pages and only existing users can create user accounts. If you are a mass spectrometry expert, contact me and I will set up an account for you with your name and contact information. If you like the Wikipedia way, edit Wikipedia. If you want to be your own Benevolent Dictator, set up your own Mediawiki installation or find a site that does Wiki hosting.

Taken to the extreme, there could be dozens of competing wikis with mass spectrometry or other information and various editing philosophies. In this situation, the goodness of the information is a function of the trust that the reader has in the provider of the information, not the ease with which the information is obtained.