On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 1:26 PM, Richard Jensen <rjensen(a)uic.edu> wrote: Granted, I am not an academic--but I am not convinced by this argument. Firstly I don't see too many university professors who are actively hostile to Wikipedia. Many do object to its improper use--and, when pressed, object to the same things that very few people in the Wikimedia community would support. Yes, students using Wikipedia as the first and last source for their research is no good. Students plagiarizing from Wikipedia is no good. Students using Wikipedia as a substitute for more applicable scholarly sources is no good. But I am hard-pressed to find anyone who really objects to students using Wikipedia as a jumping-off point to get an overview of a topic and then using the cited resources to continue their research process. What I don't see is the connection between making federally-funded research more accessible to people outside academia and the ills that professors complain of. I would find it hard to locate academics who think improving the likelihood of scholarly research appearing as a citation would be a bad thing. At worst, those who are unbendingly hostile to Wikipedia will have their opinions unchanged, and that's not a group whose opinion I am concerned about affecting by taking such a stance on this issue. Wikipedia and the scholarly journals are entirely different tools, for different purposes. I agree that people need training on how to use each kind of resource for its intended purpose, and I would be upset to have students who continually mistook one for the other. I am not sure how that is helped by ensuring the scholarly sources remain less accessible. I agree with your surprise that journal articles are cited so seldom. But on the other hand, they're difficult to use properly in the context of editing Wikipedia; much of it, especially new work, needs to be evaluated and commented on by other experts before it's clear to a non-expert how to include its findings in a general overview of a topic. It may be that editors trained in the proper use of scholarly sources still do not cite journal articles very much--except to give background information on very specific points--but use them to find what the articles are citing, in the mirror-image of the way students should be using Wikipedia. (The journal articles are too specific and current, and a Wikipedia editor often needs a more general source that puts it in proper context; Wikipedia is too general and does not go in-depth on any particular point, and a student needs a more specific source that goes into detail on particular areas of information and how they were arrived at.) However, the optimal amount of citation to journals is probably higher than what people are currently doing. But I don't see how "people don't use this resource enough" supports the idea that it's not important to make it more widely available; if anything I would think that lowering the barrier to entry. Who is going to put much effort into learning the proper use of a resource they don't have real access to? (Not to belittle your effort in offering to make JSTOR articles available--whih I appreciate as a generous gesture, though technically it is probably a violation of the terms of your institution's contract--but there is a big difference between being able to get an article on request and being able to browse it and follow a research trail from it yourself. Imagine if you had to individually request Wikipedia articles from seeing their first paragaphs, instead of following links!) -Kat -- Your donations keep Wikipedia free: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate Web: http://www.mindspillage.org Email: kat(a)wikimedia.org, kat(a)mindspillage.org (G)AIM, Freenode, gchat, identi.ca, twitter, various social sites: mindspillage