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
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 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 Wiki-research-l@lists.**wikimedia.orgWiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wiki-**research-lhttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
For most of the faculty I know (a decent number, across a wide variety of disciplines) there is no 'problem' with Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a tertiary source (i.e. it's not data or an archival document (primary) and it's not a report of research (secondary)…).
Student's in academically rigorous programs are being taught how to conduct and work with original research (i.e. creating and working with primary sources). As such, using tertiary sources of any kind is not acceptable -- they can't cite textbooks, paper encyclopedias, or dictionaries for the same reasons (or if they do they can be used only in particular, usually limited ways).
There is a certain irony to a thread that notes that many Wikipedian's don't know how/when to use primary and secondary sources at the same time it is complaining about educators not being willing to let students rely entirely on a tertiary source (and hence not learn how to work with primary and secondary sources).
It's not a case of sour grapes or "conservatism" -- it is a matter of different goals.
…
On May 21, 2012, at 2:51 PM, WereSpielChequers wrote:
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.
De: Richard Jensen rjensen@uic.edu Para: Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org CC: Enviado: Lunes 21 de Mayo de 2012 19:26 Asunto: [Wiki-research-l] the gulf between Wikipedia and Academe
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.
Dear Richard,
As a Board member of Wikimedia-España, responsible for initiatives related to higher education and Universities, my impression is quite the opposite. Over the past 2-3 years there exists a growing movement in academia to understand how Wikipedia can be integrated in the classroom, and how to work with students to participate (editing) and use it wisely (that is, with the well-known recommendations and warnings about citing Wikipedia in academic works).
Now, there are numerous pilot initiatives worldwide exploring this avenue:
http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Education_Program
I also join the call from my colleague Han-Teng, and at this point I would recommend to avoid pursuing personal opinions "ad infinitum" in the list. Paraphrasing Jono Bacon, let's shake our hands and say "let's just agree to disagree". I think that many subscribers to this list (including me) will stand firm in their position regarding the many benefits of open access publication, specially for publicly funded research.
Saludos, Felipe Ortega.
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 Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l ----- Mensaje original -----
On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 1:26 PM, Richard Jensen 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.
Granted, I am not an academic--but I am not convinced by this argument.
Firstly I don't see too many university professors who are actively hostile to Wikipedia. Many do object to its improper use--and, when pressed, object to the same things that very few people in the Wikimedia community would support. Yes, students using Wikipedia as the first and last source for their research is no good. Students plagiarizing from Wikipedia is no good. Students using Wikipedia as a substitute for more applicable scholarly sources is no good.
But I am hard-pressed to find anyone who really objects to students using Wikipedia as a jumping-off point to get an overview of a topic and then using the cited resources to continue their research process.
What I don't see is the connection between making federally-funded research more accessible to people outside academia and the ills that professors complain of. I would find it hard to locate academics who think improving the likelihood of scholarly research appearing as a citation would be a bad thing. At worst, those who are unbendingly hostile to Wikipedia will have their opinions unchanged, and that's not a group whose opinion I am concerned about affecting by taking such a stance on this issue.
Wikipedia and the scholarly journals are entirely different tools, for different purposes. I agree that people need training on how to use each kind of resource for its intended purpose, and I would be upset to have students who continually mistook one for the other. I am not sure how that is helped by ensuring the scholarly sources remain less accessible.
I agree with your surprise that journal articles are cited so seldom. But on the other hand, they're difficult to use properly in the context of editing Wikipedia; much of it, especially new work, needs to be evaluated and commented on by other experts before it's clear to a non-expert how to include its findings in a general overview of a topic. It may be that editors trained in the proper use of scholarly sources still do not cite journal articles very much--except to give background information on very specific points--but use them to find what the articles are citing, in the mirror-image of the way students should be using Wikipedia. (The journal articles are too specific and current, and a Wikipedia editor often needs a more general source that puts it in proper context; Wikipedia is too general and does not go in-depth on any particular point, and a student needs a more specific source that goes into detail on particular areas of information and how they were arrived at.) However, the optimal amount of citation to journals is probably higher than what people are currently doing.
But I don't see how "people don't use this resource enough" supports the idea that it's not important to make it more widely available; if anything I would think that lowering the barrier to entry. Who is going to put much effort into learning the proper use of a resource they don't have real access to? (Not to belittle your effort in offering to make JSTOR articles available--whih I appreciate as a generous gesture, though technically it is probably a violation of the terms of your institution's contract--but there is a big difference between being able to get an article on request and being able to browse it and follow a research trail from it yourself. Imagine if you had to individually request Wikipedia articles from seeing their first paragaphs, instead of following links!)
-Kat
wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org