Wikipedia talk:Scientific peer review

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Is this inactive?

An "active tag" was added to this project. I reverted it. There has been discussion at Wikipedia talk:Peer review#Scientific peer review tagged inactive. I have just responded there as follows:

OK, I was the editor who reverted this. First, I review scientific review articles only if they are about subjects that,as a scientist, I am familiar with. Unfortunately, no such articles have been put to scientific peer review for some time. I have been maintaining the scientific peer review for a long while, but I have been unable to do so recently due to a wikibreak as I went overseas and then being busy and ill since my return. I have tried to remove all old reviews and to also transclude new requests for review to WP:PR. I reverted the "inactive tag" because I do not think it is appropriate. Yes, this review process has problems and in fact it always has had. The initial discussions discussed such things as an elected board of reviewers and the appointment of other expert reviewers. In the end no agreement was reached, except that we agreed to try a low key version. That is what we have. It does attract some articles for review, but they are often inappropriate for a real review. You can have requests for review but that does not always attract reviewers, even on WP:PR itself. I am going to do the following:
  1. Cleanup the current reviews, archiving old ones and also transcluding new ones to WP:PR.
  2. Suggest on the WP:SPR page that new requests for review should also be transcluded to WP:PR.
  3. Set out the difficulties on the talk page of WP:SPR and then ask all the science Wikiprojects to go over there and join the debate. (Note that the list of articles for review at WP:SPR is transcluded into many of the Science WikiProject pages.)
  4. If this does lead to more good activity, then I will propose that WP:SPR should be deleted.
However, give me a bit of time to this. I am still busy.

I will be following through on those four points and welcome comment as this proceeds. --Bduke 03:58, 12 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Steps (1) and (2) are now completed. I plan to complete step (3) tomorrow if not later today. --Bduke 04:35, 12 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This Scientific Peer Review project can hardly be called successful. While there have been a steady but small flow of articles submitted for review, the actual reviews have been either non-existent or in no real way different from those done through the standard Wikipedia:Peer review process. Some editors will recall that the project was started with an enthusiastic discussion about identifying expert reviewers through an elected board. Unfortunately as time went by, it became clear there was no consensus on whether we had a board, or on how it was to be set up or on what it was supposed to do. There was also a lack of consensus on what "sciences" we were covering, and on many other aspects. In the end we sort of lapsed into a minimal review process which has staggered on for about 18 months. I think it is time we decided what to do about the project. Unless people can come up with a new way forward and enthusiastically implement it, I think we have to declare that this project be no longer active in any sense and that editors should ask for review at WP:PR. Please add your comments below. --Bduke 01:34, 13 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Step (3) is now completed. I have added something much like the above paragraph to the following WikiProjects:-

Please feel free to copy that paragraph from one of those Projects to any other relevant Project talk page.

Comments on the future of WP:SPR

Coincidentally, last weekend I was thinking of starting to help WP with its peer review process in some way. Due to my background, I was looking at these pages again, after "being away" for some time. I had a hard time to figure out, how and where I would be able to help... and this discussion brings that to the forefront, too.

  • My impression is, that first we would need a number of volunteers, who take "ownership" (yes, here is the dreaded word) of agreeing on a simple process of handling requests, and then set that up and try it out. I do not see any need for complicated structures, just a list mechanism as in other peer review projects and a set of interested editors to help the people that request a scientific review. As in other areas of WP, the quality and helpfulness of the reviews will be the mark these volunteers will make, and we should not need to restrict this to "experts" or "authorities" in certain areas. This will fall into place by itself. Hope this was not too much rambling ;-) Awolf002 02:32, 13 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • My impression is that the project has so little activity that it is probably not worth to keep it as a separate project. Sometimes even requests for WP:PR gets almost no responses. And I have the impression that often the only replies to a WP:SPR request are about style issues which are not scientific at all. I think having one review process is enough, but it is important to make sure that the review request is announced to the relevant wikiprojects, and perhaps placed into an appropriate category. --Itub 09:25, 13 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Note that there has been a lot of discussion very recently at Wikipedia_talk:Content_review/workshop on the reform of general peer review, for the reasons mentioned. Part of the solution agreed upon was to organise the general WP:PR into ten categories, of which one would be Natural Sciences. If WP:SPR is not getting much traffic, it would perhaps make sense to merge it with the nre Natural Sciences section of WP:PR. Walkerma (talk) 03:51, 20 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think integrating this with the standard peer-review process would spread reviewers less thinly and also encourage non-expert reviews of scientific articles, which could help with making our writing more accessible to the general public. Tim Vickers (talk) 20:42, 21 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The consensus seems quite clear. This Project is no longer required and reviews should be requested at WP:PR. I have edited the Project page to reflect this. I have also edited the page that is transcuded there and on some Science WikiProject pages. This is a temporary position as the two articles currently under review are still being reviewed. At a later point these need to be archived and the project page amended further. --Bduke (talk) 22:10, 22 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

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