Re: [Wiki-research-l] the gulf between Wikipedia and Academe

Hi Richard, Apart from Featured Article work, I suspect that a very large proportion of our referencing is driven by Google search and latterly Google Books. There have been a few schemes to give the more active editors accounts with various reference sources - some Highbeam accounts were recently divvied out, and a large proportion of us in the UK can get such subscriptions via our libraries. But if the first phase of Wikipedia was people writing what they knew, we are still largely in the second phase with most of the sourcing done via the Internet. It would be interesting to see if there were many takers for a training session on using other sources, but with the majority of our editors, and especially the content creators, being graduates, post graduates or current undergraduates it would be a fair assumption that a very large proportion of our editors know how to access journals, but it would be interesting to find out whether they don't do so due to lack of time lack of access or some other reason. As for the idea that students use the pedia and professors disparage it, that is of course something of a simplification, a few months ago I met someone who'd been to a Cambridge meetup and been in the minority of non-professors present. But Cambridge will of course be ahead of the game in this sort of thing. I suspect the main issue here is conservatism, and in a few years time Academics who are hostile to Wikipedia will be as common as Academics who despise electronic calculators. This issue of experts and Wikipedia is more complex. Wikipedians are rightly suspicious of "experts" who claim that their innate knowledge should override that of reliable sources. But experts who clearly know their subject, can communicate it to a general audience and can furnish sources to back up their content are usually well respected, especially if they waive pseudonymity and use their userpage to link to their University page. The areas where that doesn't quite work tend to be ones where Academic views are contentious in real life. Climate change being an extreme example. Regards WSC On 21 May 2012 18:26, Richard Jensen <<mailto:rjensen@uic.edu>rjensen@uic.edu> wrote: Han-Teng Liao highlights a very serious issue regarding the large gulf between Wikipedia and academe. University students appear to be enthusiastic users of Wikipedia while the professors either shy away or are quite hostile and warn their students against Wikipedia. One factor is academe's culture of original research and personal responsibility by name for publications, versus Wikipedia's culture of anonymity and its rejection of the notion that an editor can be respected as an expert. A second factor is the need for editors to have free access to published reliable secondary sources. I think Google-scholar and Amazon have solved much of the editors' access problem regarding books. As for journals--which is where this debate started--I do not think that open access will help Wiki editors much because I am struck by how rarely Wiki articles (on historical topics) cite any journal articles. I've offered to help editors get JSTOR articles but no one ever asks. There is something in the Wiki culture that's amiss here. Possibly it's that few Wiki editors ever took the graduate history courses that explain how to use scholarly journals. Maybe we need a program to help our editors overcome this gap and give them access to a massive base of highly relevant RS. Richard Jensen _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l