Actually, enthusiastic graduate students can do a great deal. They
already do; much of the best content of Wikipedia on traditional
subjects has been due to them, working in the normal way within
Wikipedia. They are to be encouraged, but I agree with Laura that the
best way of encouraging them will be outside the classroom. The
fundamental reason is that graduate and other advanced academic work
is necessarily original research, not preparing encyclopedic summaries
of already well known material.
There will be some basic graduate survey courses where there is a
possible match, but even there we are asking the most conservative
profession in the world to change their ways to accommodate our
methods. Some faculty will nonetheless be fascinated by doing this,
and it is there we should focus. Nobody ever wrote a good article for
Wikipedia as a sense of duty or for a grade only; it requires being
fascinated by the subject, and fascinated by the opportunity to
explain it widely.
On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 5:48 PM, Laura Hale <laura(a)fanhistory.com> wrote:
On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 9:34 PM, Richard Jensen <rjensen(a)uic.edu> wrote:
Very few Wiki articles in history city any journals, and the books used
tend to be out of date or else well known new books by famous authors
working at the Pulitzer prize level--those prize books do get cited. However
much less often does Wiki cite monographs from university presses. It is
now possible to use google and amazon for their excellent search and excerpt
roles --but those were not available back in 2006-8 when most of the writing
was done. In my opinion a way to attract professors is to encourage them to
use their classes to upgrade the scholarship in the Wiki articles. ~~~~
No. Categorically, no. Most academics who are great scholars are poor
teachers. These poor teachers have created a lot of disruption on Wikipedia
with their classes. You get students who plagiarise or who violate
referencing policies like MEDRS or who use academic sources to make
arguments that are FRINGE as a way of showing content mastery for the class
which violates Wikipedia's policies and ideals. You cannot have recent
primary research in medical articles, and a lot of classes doing that need
that. Beyond which, you're still talking a minor subset of articles where
doing a lot of citing of academic journals would make sense. No.
If you want academics involved, you go to research centres and doing
training at research centres where academics are taught about Wikipedia's
assessment process, what this means, how referencing works, etc. Then you
explain the benefits to them. Classroom work is not worth it. (And WMF
isn't going to do the research right to prove it one way or another.)
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