Mass Evaluation

= type of Mass-collaborative Science, in which large numbers of people have the opportunity to vet articles and arguments by researchers.

Description

By Jamais Cascio:

"Mass Evaluation, in which large numbers of people have the opportunity to vet articles and arguments by researchers. This is a less quantitative and more subjective approach than collaborative analysis, but can still produce high-quality results. Ball cites Slashdot and Kuro5hin as examples of this approach, with the mass of participants on the sites evaluating the posts and/or comments, eventually pushing the best stuff up to the top. In the world of science, articles submitted to journals are regularly checked out by groups of reviewers, but the set of evaluators for any given article is usually fairly small. Ball cites the physics pre-print journal arXiv as an exemplar of a countervailing trend -- that of open evaluation. ArXiv allows anyone to contribute articles, and lets participants evaluate them -- a true "peer review." (http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001090.html)