"David Gerard" wrote
Larry Sanger seems to be doing a lot of one-to-one outreach to academia. If he can work out a way for contribution to a GFDL encyclopedia to enhance an academic career, the growth in quality contributions to the open content pool should be fantastic.
The people slogging for tenure will do it? The professors won't delegate it to the grad students? The grad students won't be the people who are already writing for us?
If Larry gets tenure-track people to believe it will help them, then it really might be a breakthrough.
Charles
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If Larry gets tenure-track people to believe it will help them, then it really might be a breakthrough.
The breakthrough is getting the people that decide who to give tenure to think contributing to Citizendium is a good thing, and I can't see why they would. Universities want researchers doing research, because that's what gets funding. Writing textbooks is important, but I don't think you generally get tenure for it, and that's the closest comparison I can see.
On 1/17/07, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
"David Gerard" wrote
Larry Sanger seems to be doing a lot of one-to-one outreach to academia. If he can work out a way for contribution to a GFDL encyclopedia to enhance an academic career, the growth in quality contributions to the open content pool should be fantastic.
The people slogging for tenure will do it? The professors won't delegate it to the grad students? The grad students won't be the people who are already writing for us?
If Larry gets tenure-track people to believe it will help them, then it really might be a breakthrough.
Charles
Ah, this is related to my own dream: that someday the accessibility of the knowledge resources that you contribute to will be taken into account as an important quality. Accessibility is recognized somewhat now in the academy for tenure, but only obliquely -- while the very prestigious journals like "Nature" and "Science" are also highly-subscribed to, most of the time people make tenure based on publications that have only seen the light of day in expensive journals and books that have very few holdings and thus very few readers. Sure, this is an encyclopedia, and therefore never going to count for original research for tenure (much as writing print encyclopedias or textbooks now generally doesn't get you as many tenure points) but it would be pretty grand to be able to make the argument that because you're contributing to a world-wide freely accessible resource you're actually helping thousands more people than you would by publishing any other way. If Larry or anyone else can help swing the perception of working on Wikipedia/Citizendium/whatever away from "wasting time on the Internet" and towards "helping the world learn about my field," that will be a good thing indeed.
-- phoebe
phoebe ayers wrote:
Ah, this is related to my own dream: that someday the accessibility of the knowledge resources that you contribute to will be taken into account as an important quality. Accessibility is recognized somewhat now in the academy for tenure, but only obliquely -- while the very prestigious journals like "Nature" and "Science" are also highly-subscribed to, most of the time people make tenure based on publications that have only seen the light of day in expensive journals and books that have very few holdings and thus very few readers.
The problem of accessibility is bigger than the price of journals, or the need for some who want to have their work published need to pay to have that done. The high circulation journals that you mention have their own space limitations about what they can include, so they cannot enter into any individual science with much depth. For the user, even if the cost of a journal can be kept affordable it will only cover one corner of the subject matter. He may need to suscribe to a range of journals. That brings the costs back up, and can also open storage problems. There is an advantage to being connected to a university, and having access to the pooled resources in their libraries, but libraries have their funding problems too. As well, I keep hearing horror stories about runs of old journals being dumped because they don't have the place to keep them. Some of my 19th century bound volumes of "Scientific American" once belonged to libraries.
The Renaissance Wikipedian who is not associated with a university has to make do with what he can find. If all he can find is internet material it will shape and limit his perceptions. Fact checking should be one of our jobs, but doing that effectively depends on having access to information.
Sure, this is an encyclopedia, and therefore never going to count for original research for tenure (much as writing print encyclopedias or textbooks now generally doesn't get you as many tenure points) but it would be pretty grand to be able to make the argument that because you're contributing to a world-wide freely accessible resource you're actually helping thousands more people than you would by publishing any other way. If Larry or anyone else can help swing the perception of working on Wikipedia/Citizendium/whatever away from "wasting time on the Internet" and towards "helping the world learn about my field," that will be a good thing indeed.
Being on the hunt for tenure is bound to affect the way that one edits. If one's institution support's a particular world view he will be motivated to let that influence the way he contributes; not all of his fellow editors will share that world view.
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
The Renaissance Wikipedian who is not associated with a university has to make do with what he can find. If all he can find is internet material it will shape and limit his perceptions. Fact checking should be one of our jobs, but doing that effectively depends on having access to information.
I have been meaning to ask this. Has it ever been explored that the Foundation look at getting some subscriptions to archives and the like and allowing a reference team access to those subscriptions to do some fact checking?
Steve Block wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
The Renaissance Wikipedian who is not associated with a university has to make do with what he can find. If all he can find is internet material it will shape and limit his perceptions. Fact checking should be one of our jobs, but doing that effectively depends on having access to information.
I have been meaning to ask this. Has it ever been explored that the Foundation look at getting some subscriptions to archives and the like and allowing a reference team access to those subscriptions to do some fact checking?
I would be inclined to hold off on any kind of organized fact checking until the stable version issued is sorted out. That way we would have a way of recording which facts have been checked and which have not, and how much.
Your idea is constructive but I think it only scratches the surface of the challenge. A lot of the really useful and important material is still on paper. How do we choose the "reference team"? It would need to be big enough to handle what is already a massive job.
Ec
On 1/19/07, Steve Block steve.block@myrealbox.com wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
The Renaissance Wikipedian who is not associated with a university has to make do with what he can find. If all he can find is internet material it will shape and limit his perceptions. Fact checking should be one of our jobs, but doing that effectively depends on having access to information.
I have been meaning to ask this. Has it ever been explored that the Foundation look at getting some subscriptions to archives and the like and allowing a reference team access to those subscriptions to do some fact checking?
This was talked about a few months ago, as well. Any reasonable collection would probably cost more money than we have; and then there's the question of what (and what subjects) to buy -- there's no one "right answer" for databases and archives for most subjects, especially given the relative obscurity of much of what is getting fact-checked around here. I don't think the general databases would be much help. If anyone has any particular ideas about specific products that would be very helpful, I'd be happy to do some price-checking for various models and report back. The usual institutional academic license (based on # of users) obviously wouldn't work for us so there would have to be some pretty heavy negotiation with pubishers.
However! There's more than a few Wikipedians with access to world-class university collections, and that *can* scale. There's these two projects currently: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Newspapers_and_magazines_request_serv... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Research_resources
(The latter needs to be revived and brought up to date). How to make these services more useful, so as to distribute research work?
There's three parts to it: - knowing where to look and having access to the appropriate resource - doing the actual searching for a topic - just picking up a known citation out of a digital archive or journal and sending it to someone.
None of these things take exactly the same skill set; the first is traditionally the work of librarians, while anyone with access can do the last. Searching falls somewhere in the middle. I would love to see some kind of a 'fact-check' network set up to take advantage of what all we might have access to.
-- phoebe
p.s.: in re: your SciAm issues, Ray, it looks like it's been fully digitized from 1845-1908, and then from 1993-present, but not the stuff in the middle yet. Access to digitization (and subsequent drop in use for the printed copies) is probably why the print issues got dumped; that and lack of space for something that has a lot of duplicates around the country and can thus be ILL'ed if anyone desperately needs the paper.