FF wrote:
Ah yes, and I've got good friends who are black... (if I could roll my
eyes through e-mail, I would)
Actually, Charles is one of the few people at wikipedia with significant life experience both in and out of academia, so he probably is in a good position to judge how accurate those "ivory tower" stereotypes really are.
I don't think it's an ivory tower parody to say that academics are poor at popularization. That's how they are trained. A premium is placed on the ability to write highly technical material for experts and to amass as many such publications to put on one CV as possible. Who cares if you actually have something important to say. Relatively little premium is placed on communicating with others outside one's little research area, or on explaining the significance of research to the larger citizenry. (And I am not talking about undergraduate pedagogical issues.) People who focus on this citizenry aspect of scholarship risk putting their career in jeopardy, unless they amass a large number of publications or grant money first. At the very least, they risk getting denied tenure.
(There are some institutions which are exceptions, of course. But there is no denying that publishing technical papers in research journals is what most tenure committees and administrators are looking for first and foremost.)
darin
On 11/20/05, Brown, Darin Darin.Brown@enmu.edu wrote:
Actually, Charles is one of the few people at wikipedia with significant life experience both in and out of academia, so he probably is in a good position to judge how accurate those "ivory tower" stereotypes really are.
Maybe you missed my meaning, but anecdotal accounts about academia, especially those which are from people who have spend significant time "in and out of academia" are not really very useful data, in my view.
And my point still stands that we are apparently receiving significant support from those same apparent ivory tower intellectuals.
I won't even get into the other methodological problems -- which academics (which fields), what time period (is experience from 10 years ago applicable to academics and Wikipedia today?), or what location (state schools vs. privates, etc.), all of which have a certainly noticeable effect when one is talking about the attitudes of "academics".
But don't let me stop anyone from offering arm-chair opinions, parroting tired stereotypes, and maybe a few anecdotes or two which are supposed to inform a larger point. Better yet if they don't actually pertain to Wikipedia itself, but are broad generalizations about how academics think!
FF
"Fastfission" wrote
On 11/20/05, Brown, Darin Darin.Brown@enmu.edu wrote: Actually, Charles is one of the few people at wikipedia with significant life experience both in and out of academia, so he probably is in a good position to judge how accurate those "ivory tower" stereotypes really are.
Maybe you missed my meaning, but anecdotal accounts about academia,
especially those which are from people who have spend significant time "in and out of academia" are not really very useful data, in my view.
And my point still stands that we are apparently receiving significant
support from those same apparent ivory tower intellectuals.
Yes to the second point (the first is all wrong, obviously; actual lived experience plus some perspective is not 'anecdotal'). But, as you failed to show you actually comprehend by answering before as you did (which wasn't going to get an answer from me - my thanks to Darin Brown for answering for me):
JUST BECAUSE ACADEMICS MAY APPROVE OF SOME ASPECTS OF WP AND EVEN HELP DOES NOT MEAN THEY UNDERSTAND HOW IT WORKS.
And that's because WP operates at the level of the social facts, which are rooted in community action and are QUITE DIFFERENT from academia. The rest of your posting seems to assume we take the US model as a given. That's more quantitatively than qualitatively impressive. However it covers quite a number of different traditions, if principally the German model, I'd say. Nothing in that prepares for the unfiltered wiki way. And especially not th absence of 'guild standards', the topic of this thread.
Charles