"This alienates a large number of academics who are already very interested in learning about and contributing to Wikipedia but have difficulty justifying it as legitimate work."

[[Academia]] claims "...Academia has come to connote the cultural accumulation of knowledge, its development and transmission across generations and its practitioners and transmitters." So, if that definition is OK, I don't see the issue with the fundamental point: WP's aims are compatible, though restricted to the transmission. Cue the discussion of the relative values of teaching and research in universities, going back to the nineteenth century and resolved, largely, in the second half of the twentieth century in favour of "publish or perish".

Having been an academic, I actually think we should take a stronger line on WP's behalf. The transmission of knowledge gets reduced to a trickle when the only people who read learned journals are academics, and only in their subfield (which may have a scale as small as 100 workers worldwide). We should be saying quite clearly something like:

*Academics who feel their work has value can expect to spend some proportion of their time on "survey" writing, making it clear to outsiders (fellow academics, amongst others) what is happening in their subfield; *Such work itself ought to be valued properly by those who support research, because if it doesn't happen by some or other means, the long-term outlook for a research area is affected; *Wikipedia has come up with an excellent model for the distribution, refereeing, indexing and updating of such survey work. Editable hypertext is a real advance on the traditional survey paper.

Charles

On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 3:32 AM, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:

http://www.wittylama.com/2009/09/wikipedia-journal/

"Wikipedia currently has no way of addressing any of these issues due to the very nature of it being an “anyone can edit” wiki. This alienates a large number of academics who are already very interested in learning about and contributing to Wikipedia but have difficulty justifying it as legitimate work. Quite simply, academics in many countries/institutions must earn “points” each year to prove they’ve been working and thereby justify to government why their institution should continue to receive funding...One thing that certainly doesn’t earn points is helping to maintain the quality of the content on Wikipedia in the academic’s area of expertise - this is despite the fact that that is precisely where 90% of their students will turn to first to get some background information."

"Proposal: The creation of peer-reviewed scholarly e-journal. Academics would be commissioned to write encyclopedic articles on their area of expertise in accordance with our editorial principles (including Neutral POV, Verifiability and No Original Research) and the Wikipedia manual of style. Their article would be submitted to blind peer-review, as per the best-practices of any academically-rigorous journal, by both relevant academics and also a Wikipedian who had been a major contributor to a Featured Article on a similar topic. The final articles would be published in an edition of the “Wikipedia Journal” ready to merge into the existing Wikipedia article on that topic.

[Note: this proposal is not the same as "WikiJournal" on Meta (the purpose of which is to encourage Original Research scholarship) or "Wiki Journal" on WikiVersity/Wikia (the purpose of which is to publish articles about Wiki-related scholarship).]"

"Articles, once published, could then be merged into the existing Wikipedia article (or a new article created if one did not exist before) and appropriate attribution placed in the external links section of the Wikipedia article to the Author and journal edition. Also, it might be nice to have a talkpage template indicating that an academic had made substantial contributions to the article. *Hopefully* the newly refurbished Wikipedia article could then be taken to Featured Article candidacy relatively quickly."

Not a terrible idea. It'd be kind of like the union of specialist online encyclopedias written by single authors, such as the Stanford Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. But I suspect the author is a little too sanguine about how easy it would be to incorporate these big new articles into actual WP articles - and if they don't get integrated, then they're not serving their purpose.

-- gwern

Since nobody has pointed to Scholarpedia yet, here is a link: http://www.scholarpedia.org/

Scholarpedia is a project to have the currently leading expert in a field, preferably the original researcher or inventor, write up that topic in a reasonably accessible format. The project is wildly successful. The authors get to choose the copyright status, whether copyright, GFDL, or BY-NC-DC. Each article has curators. Anyone (including you) can become a curator. Eligibility for curatorship is based on several factors including your scholar index, which is a measure of your contributions to the encyclopedia.

Clearly, this information will not be ported back to Wikipedia. From the site: "*The approach of Scholarpedia does not compete with, but rather complements, that of Wikipedia: instead of covering a broad range of topics, Scholarpedia covers a few narrow fields, but does that exhaustively.*"

A WikiJournal project would have to compete with Scholarpedia for the attention of academics, and from the perspective of an academic I have a hard time seeing why Scholarpedia is not preferable.