Current historical research appears first in journal articles and later in books (books take perhaps 3-5 years to get published in history!). Convention papers are not so useful because historians do not usually circulate their convention papers widely.
The latest edition of a textbook will try to reflect recent scholarship but in history they rarely have footnotes so it is never quite clear what or who they are referencing.
Very few Wiki articles in history city any journals, and the books used tend to be out of date or else well known new books by famous authors working at the Pulitzer prize level--those prize books do get cited. However much less often does Wiki cite monographs from university presses. It is now possible to use google and amazon for their excellent search and excerpt roles --but those were not available back in 2006-8 when most of the writing was done. In my opinion a way to attract professors is to encourage them to use their classes to upgrade the scholarship in the Wiki articles. ~~~~
Looking at a spinoff Shakespeare article: [[Shakespeare's plays]]. It's peak activity year was 2007. A dozen people made 10 or more edits. It has 26 citations and no bibliography. There are no scholarly journals. Half the citations are over 40 years old. Only one book was published after 2007. That profile strongly suggests editors who are unfamiliar with current scholarship.
Happily the article on [[WIlliam Shakespeare's Style]] is MUCH more up-to-date. ~~~~
2012/5/3 Richard Jensen rjensen@uic.edu:
Looking at a spinoff Shakespeare article: [[Shakespeare's plays]]. It's peak activity year was 2007. A dozen people made 10 or more edits. It has 26 citations and no bibliography. There are no scholarly journals. Half the citations are over 40 years old. Only one book was published after 2007. That profile strongly suggests editors who are unfamiliar with current scholarship.
I sense low-hanging fruit here. What academic wouldn't want his paper to be cited more? Wikipedia is not an academic source, but it's a hugely popular one. A correctly-done campaign to get academics and their students to cite recently published papers will benefit everybody.
Happily the article on [[WIlliam Shakespeare's Style]] is MUCH more up-to-date. ~~~~
... Which shows that a lot of is very intermittent and haphazard, but often in a good way.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
For my last semester class at the Brazilian Education Program I encouraged students to use recent books and papers in Portuguese, instead of only the traditional English textbooks copied from the WP:EN articles. This also happened because the English proficiency level for some students was not so good, so I had to make them use material in Portuguese anyway [1]. I noticed this turned out to be a great way to have academic papers in Portuguese to be known and read. This gets even easier because most online journals in Portuguese are open source [2].
As for the debate on peak edits on English Wikipedia, I'd just like to add a comment. I recently watched this documentary about Wikipedia [3] where one of the Encyclopaedia Britannica editors said WP should be understood as a game. I don't meant to raise the issue about WP X Britannica, neither I actually agree with him, but this is what came to my mind while reading the current discussion. What I mean is that eventually - and already now for some articles - specialists will have to be recruited instead of the average editor. I am participating in a project that tried to deal with this issue, by making students edit for grades, but I'm certain there are many other ways to do it.
Juliana.
[1] An example: http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romaniza%C3%A7%C3%A3o [2] http://www.scielo.org [3] http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-truth-according-to-wikipedia/
On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 8:58 AM, Amir E. Aharoni < amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
2012/5/3 Richard Jensen rjensen@uic.edu:
Looking at a spinoff Shakespeare article: [[Shakespeare's plays]]. It's
peak
activity year was 2007. A dozen people made 10 or more edits. It has 26 citations and no bibliography. There are no scholarly journals. Half the citations are over 40 years old. Only one book was published after 2007. That profile strongly suggests editors who are unfamiliar with current scholarship.
I sense low-hanging fruit here. What academic wouldn't want his paper to be cited more? Wikipedia is not an academic source, but it's a hugely popular one. A correctly-done campaign to get academics and their students to cite recently published papers will benefit everybody.
Happily the article on [[WIlliam Shakespeare's Style]] is MUCH more up-to-date. ~~~~
... Which shows that a lot of is very intermittent and haphazard, but often in a good way.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
For a discussion about how to make Wikipedia more attractive to academics, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Ambassadors/Archive_5#How_to_mak...
Pine
-----Original Message----- From: Amir E. Aharoni Sent: Thursday, 03 May, 2012 04:58 To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: ignoring recent scholarship
2012/5/3 Richard Jensen rjensen@uic.edu:
Looking at a spinoff Shakespeare article: [[Shakespeare's plays]]. It's peak activity year was 2007. A dozen people made 10 or more edits. It has 26 citations and no bibliography. There are no scholarly journals. Half the citations are over 40 years old. Only one book was published after 2007. That profile strongly suggests editors who are unfamiliar with current scholarship.
I sense low-hanging fruit here. What academic wouldn't want his paper to be cited more? Wikipedia is not an academic source, but it's a hugely popular one. A correctly-done campaign to get academics and their students to cite recently published papers will benefit everybody.
Happily the article on [[WIlliam Shakespeare's Style]] is MUCH more up-to-date. ~~~~
... Which shows that a lot of is very intermittent and haphazard, but often in a good way.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
_______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 9:34 PM, Richard Jensen rjensen@uic.edu wrote:
Very few Wiki articles in history city any journals, and the books used tend to be out of date or else well known new books by famous authors working at the Pulitzer prize level--those prize books do get cited. However much less often does Wiki cite monographs from university presses. It is now possible to use google and amazon for their excellent search and excerpt roles --but those were not available back in 2006-8 when most of the writing was done. In my opinion a way to attract professors is to encourage them to use their classes to upgrade the scholarship in the Wiki articles. ~~~~
No. Categorically, no. Most academics who are great scholars are poor teachers. These poor teachers have created a lot of disruption on Wikipedia with their classes. You get students who plagiarise or who violate referencing policies like MEDRS or who use academic sources to make arguments that are FRINGE as a way of showing content mastery for the class which violates Wikipedia's policies and ideals. You cannot have recent primary research in medical articles, and a lot of classes doing that need that. Beyond which, you're still talking a minor subset of articles where doing a lot of citing of academic journals would make sense. No.
If you want academics involved, you go to research centres and doing training at research centres where academics are taught about Wikipedia's assessment process, what this means, how referencing works, etc. Then you explain the benefits to them. Classroom work is not worth it. (And WMF isn't going to do the research right to prove it one way or another.)
Actually, enthusiastic graduate students can do a great deal. They already do; much of the best content of Wikipedia on traditional subjects has been due to them, working in the normal way within Wikipedia. They are to be encouraged, but I agree with Laura that the best way of encouraging them will be outside the classroom. The fundamental reason is that graduate and other advanced academic work is necessarily original research, not preparing encyclopedic summaries of already well known material.
There will be some basic graduate survey courses where there is a possible match, but even there we are asking the most conservative profession in the world to change their ways to accommodate our methods. Some faculty will nonetheless be fascinated by doing this, and it is there we should focus. Nobody ever wrote a good article for Wikipedia as a sense of duty or for a grade only; it requires being fascinated by the subject, and fascinated by the opportunity to explain it widely.
On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 5:48 PM, Laura Hale laura@fanhistory.com wrote:
On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 9:34 PM, Richard Jensen rjensen@uic.edu wrote:
Very few Wiki articles in history city any journals, and the books used tend to be out of date or else well known new books by famous authors working at the Pulitzer prize level--those prize books do get cited. However much less often does Wiki cite monographs from university presses. It is now possible to use google and amazon for their excellent search and excerpt roles --but those were not available back in 2006-8 when most of the writing was done. In my opinion a way to attract professors is to encourage them to use their classes to upgrade the scholarship in the Wiki articles. ~~~~
No. Categorically, no. Most academics who are great scholars are poor teachers. These poor teachers have created a lot of disruption on Wikipedia with their classes. You get students who plagiarise or who violate referencing policies like MEDRS or who use academic sources to make arguments that are FRINGE as a way of showing content mastery for the class which violates Wikipedia's policies and ideals. You cannot have recent primary research in medical articles, and a lot of classes doing that need that. Beyond which, you're still talking a minor subset of articles where doing a lot of citing of academic journals would make sense. No.
If you want academics involved, you go to research centres and doing training at research centres where academics are taught about Wikipedia's assessment process, what this means, how referencing works, etc. Then you explain the benefits to them. Classroom work is not worth it. (And WMF isn't going to do the research right to prove it one way or another.)
-- twitter: purplepopple blog: ozziesport.com
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Laura said:
Classroom work is not worth it. (And WMF isn't going to do the research
right to prove it one way or another.)
The data are public. Have you performed an analysis to reach this conclusion?
If not, I'd be happy to look for myself if you have a convincing (and preferably quantitative) method for deriving a cost/benefit relationship of classroom contributions.
-Aaron
On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 4:48 PM, Laura Hale laura@fanhistory.com wrote:
On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 9:34 PM, Richard Jensen rjensen@uic.edu wrote:
Very few Wiki articles in history city any journals, and the books used tend to be out of date or else well known new books by famous authors working at the Pulitzer prize level--those prize books do get cited. However much less often does Wiki cite monographs from university presses. It is now possible to use google and amazon for their excellent search and excerpt roles --but those were not available back in 2006-8 when most of the writing was done. In my opinion a way to attract professors is to encourage them to use their classes to upgrade the scholarship in the Wiki articles. ~~~~
No. Categorically, no. Most academics who are great scholars are poor teachers. These poor teachers have created a lot of disruption on Wikipedia with their classes. You get students who plagiarise or who violate referencing policies like MEDRS or who use academic sources to make arguments that are FRINGE as a way of showing content mastery for the class which violates Wikipedia's policies and ideals. You cannot have recent primary research in medical articles, and a lot of classes doing that need that. Beyond which, you're still talking a minor subset of articles where doing a lot of citing of academic journals would make sense. No.
If you want academics involved, you go to research centres and doing training at research centres where academics are taught about Wikipedia's assessment process, what this means, how referencing works, etc. Then you explain the benefits to them. Classroom work is not worth it. (And WMF isn't going to do the research right to prove it one way or another.)
-- twitter: purplepopple blog: ozziesport.com
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org