On May 3, 2012, at 11:17 AM, Steven Walling wrote: Wow. I never made this connection. I'd always thought of the issue as the somewhat idealistic: scholar => citizen But you are absolutely right, the more immediate need is: scholar => wikipedian => citizen Of course citizens and wikipedians are sometimes hard to distinguish. But, with the distinction made, the path is more believably important.

Yes -- Wikipedia is an exercise in knowledge mobilization, not knowledge creation. While there are some exceptions, most scholars are seeking to create knowledge (and academic literature is part of that process -- hence rarely is it useful for knowledge mobilization). We don't expect a physicist (or an electrical engineer) to be able wire a house (or even write instructions for how to do it) -- and we don't expect an academic paper to useful for someone wanting to know how to plan wiring. Researchers/scholars, inventors, product developers and users are usually different people. Wikis don't eliminate the roles -- they just make the different roles open to more ... On May 3, 2012, at 5:29 PM, Ward Cunningham wrote: On May 3, 2012, at 11:17 AM, Steven Walling wrote: I would strongly encourage you to join the movement lobbying for openness in scholarly work. Otherwise, you're complaining about a problem that Wikipedians do not have the power to fix, because academics tacitly support a system in which knowledge is kept in the hands of the few who can pay for it. Wow. I never made this connection. I'd always thought of the issue as the somewhat idealistic: scholar => citizen But you are absolutely right, the more immediate need is: scholar => wikipedian => citizen Of course citizens and wikipedians are sometimes hard to distinguish. But, with the distinction made, the path is more believably important. _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org<mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

All fields have reviews, textbooks, popularization books, and encyclopedias ... but there are few scholars or disciplines that see creation of these resources (as valuable as they are) as their primary mission. For this discussion it's important for us to see that there are many ways in which this is highly functional. Telling craftsmen (people?) to pay attention to end users needs rarely results in better design and it severely disrupts their social structures which are focused on intrinsic values. In contrast, "entrepreneurs"/product creators/etc. are very focused on the match between artifacts and needs -- and their communities have very different ways of organizing and motivating participants. While these distinctions are all a matter of degree, in most cases people (and groups) find it very difficult to be both/and. ... On May 4, 2012, at 2:42 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote:

A distributed version of keepgrabbing2.py and a little bit of civil disobedience on the part of some scholars and wikipedians would go a long ways towards cutting this particular Gordian knot. (We could call the project KeepGrabbing@Home --- the search for intelligent life on THIS planet.) You may well disagree with this approach. In fact, I see two options; the other may be attractive. (But I don't see any reason to imagine that "lobbying" will get the job done.) The two options: (1) building an infrastructure that makes the old one obsolete; (2) or recognizing the non-obsolescence of the old system, and stealing whatever it has to offer. Both courses can be pursued in parallel.

They are more than an archive. They impose a very hefty surcharge on their own account, beyond what they need pay for licensing the backfiles from the publishers. They spent the money very usefully in the past: they have scanned and archived hundreds of thousands of pages print journals at a time nobody else was doing it sand no electronic backfiles existed, themselves developing the technology. They continue to archive additional print publications--but since there are so many people prepared to use what is now a mature technology without charging anybody for it, perhaps this role is no longer essential. And making available backfiles that publishers have already digitized costs very little by comparison. But their publishers are by and large not profit-making commercial enterprises: they are primarily scholarly societies, some of them prosperous, but most very precariously funded themselves. On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 7:06 PM, Steven Walling &lt;swalling(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: -- David Goodman DGG at the enWP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG