On 1/18/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
I think the first scenario would still be a major breakthrough; requiring graduate students to write their literature papers for Wikipedia is a whole different beast from (a few idealistic) graduate students writing on top of their other duties.
Wikipedia is written for the layman, a graduate student's papers are written for the expert. Writing for Wikipedia requires different skills than the ones graduate students are being tested on with their papers, and the skills currently being tested are required, so writing for Wikipedia would have to be in addition to, it can't be instead of, academic papers.
There is huge variation in the way graduate student papers are written. It would be relatively easy to assign literature papers where the for-the-expert material and original analysis strictly separated from the summary-of-the-literature aspects. It's true that the skills emphasized in graduate training are different from the ones needed to write good Wikipedia articles. But that's a flaw in graduate training; they ought to be developing the skills to write for a general audience. Keep in mind that I'm only talking about literature papers, which are intended for developing a feel for what's been written about a particular topic; these are not academic papers in the sense of potential publications based on original research (which graduate students also write plenty of).
-Sage