-----Original Message----- From: charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com [mailto:charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2007 07:41 AM To: 'English Wikipedia' Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Troubling news on Citizendium
"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
I think any of us, if asked, should be willing to write recommendations for contributors. Whether they will have traction will depend on how knowledgeable and intelligent the person considering it is.
Fred
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
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. Any sort of large-scale validation within the academy of the value of writing for Wikipedia would be a huge step forward, even without formal recognition mechanisms for tenure-track people. In the humanities at least, the book-writing culture is pretty solidly entrenched. There's more flexibility at the pre-degree and post-tenure stages.
I think any of us, if asked, should be willing to write recommendations for contributors. Whether they will have traction will depend on how knowledgeable and intelligent the person considering it is.
Fred
That's an excellent idea. When the time comes that I need letters of recommendation, I'll call on a Wikipedian or two; even if it doesn't help me, it might help someone down the line as a precedent.
-Sage
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.
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.
Excellent point. I mainly copy edit for clarity and readability. An
encyclopedia just isn't any good if the average reader (or a learning child, perhaps) can't or won't read it.
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
Fred Bauder wrote:
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
I think any of us, if asked, should be willing to write recommendations for contributors. Whether they will have traction will depend on how knowledgeable and intelligent the person considering it is.
Hmm. Maybe if ArbCom took on the task their word on recommendations might be more authoratative. ;-)
Ec