Delirium wrote:
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Fri, 16 Feb 2007 09:05:44 -0800 (PST), Ken Arromdee 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. ... 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/
I grok the idea but am unfamiliar with the acronym.
Computer science is a relatively recent field of study, so the positivity of the phenomenon makes more sense there than it would in most other fields. In older disciplines entire archives of material have never been digitized at all, and I can't help but be concerned about the control on knowledge exercised by those who choose what to digitize. Affordability is a major factor, but it's far from being the only one. I'm far more concened by who don't bother to look beyond the internet, and what that's doing to the general state of knowledge.
Ec