It appears the PRSA study (a) was bought into the PRSA Journal, i.e. they were paid to include it (b) went through a different "peer review" mechanism to the one usually used, so as to be able to be branded "peer-reviewed." And a CREWE member (Robert Lawton) has explicitly stated his intent to use said "peer review" as an excuse to use it as a "reliable source" for Wikipedia purposes. When I have more details nailed down I'll be making a blog post about this. But the tl;dr is that it was, from its inception, precisely the sort of brazen, cynical PR attempt to warp Wikipedia policies that people worry about from corporate editors - David Gerard (talk) 10:20, 1 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for pointing to the 2010 paper and Signpost article (which I wrote myself). However, both were already mentioned in the text that you removed ("... reported in a 2010 viewpoint article in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) (Signpost coverage)"). From this it should have been obvious that it had been a deliberate decision to include this item; the publication as such is certainly recent enough to be in scope (J Bone Joint Surg Br 2012 vol. 94-B no. SUPP XIV 13); and for better or worse this 2012 abstract will be read by people; it makes sense to give them the context that you noted. Therefore I have reinserted the item (modifying the wording a bit regarding the abstract). Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 22:42, 1 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I have considered trying to clean it up, but I'm not sure where to start. Probably a RFC or working group, as you wouldn't want to go to TFD/CfD without a very good idea of what to change. Those 388 tags would probably assign article to just as many cats, even ignoring the per month cats. The silliest systems are where BLP templates/cats don't match the non-BLP versions. The WP:CLEANUP WikiProject might need a restart/reinvigoration. The-Pope (talk) 16:56, 4 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
"To test their hypothesis, they determined the top 1% most productive English Wikipedia users among the currently active editors who had yet to receive their first barnstar." Well right there they are introducing a strong bias into the selection process by pre-screening high productivity editors who had not received any barnstar-style praise. It is clearly not a representative sample. Ergo I'm pretty dubious about the result. Regards, RJH (talk) 16:06, 4 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
It is a valid result for highly productive editors. You are free to extrapolate this to less productive users, and I'd be interested in an argument why that should be dismissed. Nageh (talk) 17:15, 4 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
It is a valid result for highly productive editors that have never received a barnstar. One might ask why they never received a barnstar. Was it because their work was generally not of a distinctive and/or quality nature? Does the undistinguished nature of their contributions make them predisposed to have a higher need for peer recognition? This is unclear, but mathematically it appears to be a biased selection. (Note that I'm not making claims about the quality of the selection pool: I'm just saying that these are unknown variables that are not accounted for by the control sample.) Regards, RJH (talk) 20:45, 4 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
That is a fair point. Still, I'd be surprised if the result could not be somewhat meaningfully extrapolated to other editor groups (moreover as it may be a bit hard to assess the motivational aspect of barnstars on editors who are more often receiving barnstars anyway). What I am saying is that the result should be interpreted with some healthy bit of caution, but concluding that the result is pretty dubious seems a bit much to me. Nageh (talk) 21:02, 4 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Fair enough. I agree that peer recognition is good for the project and can be motivational. Guess I'm just getting skeptical at my age. Thanks. Regards, RJH (talk) 21:06, 4 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
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