From ptrourke@mediaone.net Thu Mar 23 19:11:47 2000 Received: from mxu3.u.washington.edu (mxu3.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.7]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.09/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id TAA45768 for ; Thu, 23 Mar 2000 19:11:45 -0800 Received: from chmls05.mediaone.net (ne.mediaone.net [24.128.1.70]) by mxu3.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id TAA22909 for ; Thu, 23 Mar 2000 19:11:44 -0800 Received: from patricktrourke (h00500480cb85.ne.mediaone.net [24.147.80.93]) by chmls05.mediaone.net (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id WAA02992; Thu, 23 Mar 2000 22:11:41 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <003801bf953e$a9b22a80$5d509318@ne.mediaone.net> From: "P. T. Rourke" To: "Classics List" Subject: Nupedia [Long and somewhat TAN] Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2000 22:11:35 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2919.6600 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2919.6600 To anyone who cares for my opinion: I've communicated with a couple of folks at Nupedia about my questions. Sounds like those folks are on the ball (I should have figured, since the first references I got to Nupedia were from a very reliable & intelligent source, a gentleman on this list, but that ever-trendy reference to Linux bothered me*). The license is an Open Source Definition-compliant open content license, or at least is intended to be, which is sufficiently analogous to the GPL to excuse the reference to Linux. Certainly no one would accuse me of being against the open content model for encyclopedias. Their policies seem to be on the right track as well: http://www.nupedia.com/policy.html and also http://www.nupedia.com/join.html What particularly impressed me is something in the fine print - the fact that they seem to be vaguely interested in the idea of open peer review (i.e., not blind review), an idea I've toyed with in a couple of postings to the list in a sloppy way, much to the shock of my elders and academic betters. I understand the drawbacks, and they do as well (I'd say they're less enamored of it than I am); but in the wild publishing environment of the web, I think the more open and specific criticism of published work, the better our ultimate ability to make informed judgments of the reliability of those published resources. Here's the complete content of that section: D. THE FUNCTION OF REVIEW GROUPS. Nupedia review groups will obviously be quite a different type of peer review process from the way a typical journal works. But I think it may work rather well (though that's certainly an empirical question), for the simple reason that the process of moving articles from the author's computer to Nupedia not be impeded by the delay of one reviewer. What is ideal (and, I think, probable) is that Nupedia will eventually attract several different experts qualified to judge the merits of any given article. And they may usefully brainstorm in a way that is particularly useful to the quality of the article. This is not, however, blind review; peer reviewers may, perhaps, be more restrained than they might be in a blind review. On the other hand, the Internet already has a tendency to enliven conversation (to put it nicely) so perhaps the tendency toward restraint and rudeness will cancel each other out. However it works out, we will remain open to suggestions about improvement to the review process. We would also like to learn what works particularly well, so that information can be conveyed to other review groups or otherwise used as appropriate. If this material, the conversations of the peer reviewers (or an approriately edited version thereof), is archived and a URI attached to the bottom of each article so reviewed, an enormous resource will be available for assessing the reliability of the material in the encyclopedia. One can think of it as analogous to committee meetings and floor debate on bills and the way in which those records are sometimes used in judicial review of the resulting laws. Forgive my self-indulgence this week; on this subject, I have the excuse that this is an area of significant interest to me, and the consequences of these questions are something I think should be kept in mind by anyone who's considering creating an academic resource on the web, especially any classicists, for as a group classicists still have some conception of standards of proof and disproof (despite my occassional complaints to the contrary). Patrick T. Rourke ptrourke@mediaone.net *As a recent Linux convert, perhaps I'm too sensitive. Not that I'm using Linux *right now.* .