thanks for the note--
I largely agree. Are relations between Wiki and Academe better in
UK? I hope so
Richard
At 12:51 PM 5/21/2012, you wrote:
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
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