Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Fri, 16 Feb 2007 09:05:44 -0800 (PST), Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
This is a special case of a fundamental problem with Wikipedia: the demand for sources and notability produces a heavy bias towards things which are on the Internet and can be easily found.
It's called FUTON bias and it doesn't only affect Wikipedia.
In some corners of academia, particularly computer science, this is sometimes seen as a positive phenomenon. Papers freely available on the internet are cited more frequently (controlling for other factors) than papers that are only available in print or from pay archives [1]. This provides a nice bit of pressure for authors to put their papers on their homepages, and for journals to make their archives publicly accessible. That pressure has been successful in a number of cases (e.g. the editorial board of the journal _Machine Learning_ resigning en masse to support an open-access alternative [2], which pressured _Machine Learning_ itself into making many of its own archives freely available online). The result is more information available to everyone, not only the wealthy or those who have affiliations with wealthy first-world universities---a goal that seems rather in keeping with Wikipedia's spirit.
-Mark
[1] S. Lawrence. Online or invisible? _Nature_ 411, 2001. Online version: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/online-nature01/
[2] Editorial Board of the Kluwer Journal, Machine Learning: Resignation Letter. _SIGIR Forum_ 35(2), 2001. Online version: http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigir/forum/F2001/sigirFall01Letters.html