On 12/21/08, Thomas Larsen larsen.thomas.h@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
This is an interesting idea indeed. However, I'm not sure it would fly, for two reasons:
- I doubt many receivers (of journals, etc.) would be able to
understand them well enough. Academic papers aren't always easy to understand, especially for a non-expert, and they could be, God forbid, _misunderstood_.
My experience is 100% to the contrary. By and large, we're not exclusively laypeople-- often we ARE the experts. Our math articles are written by math experts, our chemistry articles are written by chemists, our physics articles are written by physicists.
Plus, however difficult it is to understand articles, it's all the more difficult to try to write without any access to them, going exclusively by popular press accounts or abstracts. The results of having access are almost guaranteed to be better than the current situation, where some editors do have access, some editors don't have access, and so it's hard to double-check each other's work.
- Service providers would, I think, be unwilling to catch on to this
idea, given the low image of Wikipedia in many areas of academia.
I'm skeptical the service providers will think much beyond whether its in their own self-interest (be that purely financial, charitable, or PR).
My experience, however, is that everyone in academia LOVES Wikipedia-- a few old fogeys excepted perhaps. But people who like to learn love a giant encyclopedia that's free and has entries on everything.
Academia loves wikipedia-- they just don't like it when it's used for something it's not. A master carpenter loves having a power screwdriver for home repairs-- he just doesn't want to go to his jobsite and find his apprentices clumsily trying to use the blunt side of a power screwdriver to hammer nails.
Alec