charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
"David Gerard" wrote
OTOH, I've often wondered if setting up an academic wiki would be something to attract people.
The concept is probably sound. The trouble would be that academia values (over-values, we might say) the expert in a strictly delimited area. So where would the good syntheses come from?
I don't think all academics would be opposed to collaborating, especially on syntheses. Academia values narrow experts in coming up with original research, but there's a widespread feeling, at least in some of the sciences, that more summarization/review would be nice, if done well.
Indeed I'm aware of at least one wiki set up for that purpose. In this particular case it's to summarize current work on reinforcement learning, and set up by Satinder Singh (who is fairly well-known in the academic RL community): http://neuromancer.eecs.umich.edu/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Main/WebHome
-Mark