On 02/04/2008, Piotr Konieczny piokon@post.pl wrote:
Cooperation between academics and Wikipedia, with focus on utilizing Wikipedia as an educational tool - benefiting students and our project - is a very important issue indeed. We have two projects that are dedicated to this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Classroom_coordination I would suggest that talk page of Classroom coordination project may be better for discussion - it has a higher visibility and transparency.
Finally, with a bit of selfish self-promotion, I will also point to my article on Teaching with Wikipedia: http://itdl.org/Journal/Jan_07/article02.htm
<rant> Academics would contribute widely to Wikipedia from my view, but the idea that anyone can change the resulting content away from what they as experts see as the best position, discourages them immediately. They would rather get information published in a static article where unknolwedgeables can't make 2+2=5 (for a rather trivial example) where their expert opinion says otherwise. And yes, there are going to be some who stay around to police an article forever and a day, but they are definitely not likely to be the majority. Citizendiums slower migration status "should" be very enticing to an academic who has actual papers to write and still wants to contribute to knowledge without it being destroyed at the will of the mob effectively within hours or even weeks where the academic had a real life endeavour that procluded them policing their set of articles for that time. If they only had one article to police they aren't likely to be in a network, but I guess they might be more willing to check everyday for a few months to argue with opposing users who pickup on their subject. Hopefully the troll finds something better to do or the academic is lost. Wikipedia doesn't really need academics though. It has lots of outstanding featured articles which get locked down except for minor changes... It even has a Conflict of Interest and NPOV policy that can be used to enforce the mob opinion, unless the academic has the will power and stamina to deal with idiots far enough to get through the wikipedia courts of appeal to the Supreme Court of Arbitration. </rant>
There should be protection for academics... I know expert opinions have been shunned in the past, but maybe, just maybe, you can get a group of free culture fanatics to accept that they aren't gods of knowledge far enough to accept an expert opinion or two as meaningful.
Wikipedia for academics.... maybe not given the inbuilt mechanisms made specifically for discouraging them. Getting them to use wiki's in general however is a much easier task though and should be promoted more widely even if on-Wikipedia networks don't pick up.
Peter Ansell