On 05 July 2020 at 10:25 "Amir E. Aharoni" <amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:

Of course, there are things that a team of trained and well-read academics can do and a community of untrained amateurs cannot, no matter how large and motivated it is. But it works the other way, too: there are things that very well-trained academics cannot (or would not) do, but a large motivated community can (and would). Of course, it will work best if there is collaboration between professionals and amateurs.

 

It is worth giving some background here. A precursor of AW is the Wikimedia "article placeholder" project. User:Frimelle wrote a dissertation on it, and I see it is online:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Generating_Article_Placeholders_from_Wikidata_for_Wikipedia_-_Increasing_Access_to_Free_and_Open_Knowledge.pdf

That was in 2016. In any case, the Wikimedians and academics are not really disjoint groups of people.

Charles