On 26 October 2012 14:51, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
As a bit of personal advice, I have to say something
brutally honest:
The problem of amateurs/experts dynamics in Wikipedia is one that I
care quite strongly about, and I would really like to see productive
discussion about it. However, threats of retiring or deleting own
contributions never help move such discussion forward. As much as I
understand the feeling, expressing it this way simply doesn't work.
Again, it's a pattern that repeated itself with academics from USA,
Portugal, Israel, Russia and other countries, and from fields as
diverse as Political Science, Education and Engineering. It would be
much more useful to understand the current policies and practices, to
try to identify particular flaws in them and to propose constructive
changes.
It also helps to understand the reason for the "no original research"
rule and not citing oneself: the crank problem is real, and vast. As a
working academic scientist, you would have a green ink file *this*
big. It's worse at Wikipedia. Hence the citation culture.
- d.