[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia: the Journal

[Charles Matthews]

"This alienates a large number of academics who are already very 
interested in learning about and contributing to Wikipedia but have 
difficulty justifying it as legitimate work."

[[Academia]] claims "...Academia has come to connote the cultural 
accumulation of knowledge, its development and transmission across 
generations and its practitioners and transmitters." So, if that 
definition is OK, I don't see the issue with the fundamental point: WP's 
aims are compatible, though restricted to the transmission. Cue the 
discussion of the relative values of teaching and research in 
universities, going back to the nineteenth century and resolved, 
largely, in the second half of the twentieth century in favour of 
"publish or perish".

Having been an academic, I actually think we should take a stronger line 
on WP's behalf. The transmission of knowledge gets reduced to a trickle 
when the only people who read learned journals are academics, and only 
in their subfield (which may have a scale as small as 100 workers 
worldwide). We should be saying quite clearly something like:

*Academics who feel their work has value can expect to spend some 
proportion of their time on "survey" writing, making it clear to 
outsiders (fellow academics, amongst others) what is happening in their 
subfield;
*Such work itself ought to be valued properly by those who support 
research, because if it doesn't happen by some or other means, the 
long-term outlook for a research area is affected;
*Wikipedia has come up with an excellent model for the distribution, 
refereeing, indexing and updating of such survey work. Editable 
hypertext is a real advance on the traditional survey paper.

Charles