Comments on: Can Crowdsourcing Beat Academic Peer Review?

By: Grand Text Auto » EP Meta: Chapter One

Grand Text Auto » EP Meta: Chapter One — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:19:05 +0000

[...] see this project sparking discussion elsewhere, as summarized in blog posts from MIT Press (citing Info/Law, ReadWriteWeb, Scholarly Communication, Sources and Methods, and Voir Dire) and the Chronicle’s [...]

By: Luis Villa’s Blog / morning link bits

Luis Villa’s Blog / morning link bits — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 03:07:42 +0000

[...] My journal is starting up for the semester, which means I’ll be spending quality time with this paper and wondering if there are better ways to do this… [...]

By: Chris S

Chris S — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:33:25 +0000

I really have to wonder whether top down control is required to maintain quality or just having a more homogenous pool of talent working together. Something between full out wikipedia style and open source dictators (which leads to serious issues with fragmentation of the code base in the worst cases). For example, instead of just letting people comment or full on letting people edit, let people comment until the “dictator” has seen enough from that person to know that they are competent to add to the dialogue via the editing process… just my thoughts after watching several of these projects go through the wringer and back out again.

By: Tim Armstrong

Tim Armstrong — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:54:51 +0000

Great observation, Dean. Open-source guru Eric Raymond wrote that you can’t let the crowds do everything; even open-source projects need a “benevolent dictator,” someone sitting at the top of the heap to provide quality checks and assure uniformity. I’m sure that Wardrip-Fruin will be filling that role for his own book, as Lessig himself did with Code Version 2.0. The lack of such a “benevolent dictator” guiding the project and ensuring accuracy is at the root of a lot of the criticisms of Wikipedia, which seems to have consciously decided not to follow Raymond’s advice on this point.

By: Dean C. Rowan

Dean C. Rowan — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 04:41:35 +0000

On a tangent here: Not so long ago, I wrote a review for a fledgling online journal, Plagiary, of a book about collaboration and the digital economy published by MIT Press. The book, whose main title, like Lessig's first, is CODE, was a collection of articles by scholars from a range of disciplines, and the editor claims to have taken an “‘open source’ approach" to his task, by which he means he was not concerned to impose a uniform tone or lexicon on the final text. My closing remarks took the publisher to task for its miserable editorial work, manifest as a multitude of typos and a pathetically spare index. So I'm wondering whether the novelty and excitement surrounding crowdsourced editing, like an "'open source' approach" to editing, will distract from the more mundane business of producing a useful, at least ordinarily refined end product. (Granted, editing for style and nit-picky grammatical glitches is distinct from peer-reviewing for substance and attribution...but it's not wholly distinct.)