2007/5/8, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
http://www.mazar.ca/2007/05/07/wikipedia-as-community-service/
Much as lawyers have a certain pro bono obligation, so academics could as well.
How to sell this one to academia?
To me, term pro bono in combination with academics doesn't fit. Academics are doing pro bono work every day. Every day they lose money, because they have decided to become academics instead of, for example, lawyers (to be precise, in germany a fresh high school teacher earns much more than a Postdoc and even slightly more than a fresh professor). Every day they are providing community service in doing education and research for the benifit of society. So, this cannot be sold to academics.
Nevertheless, we could do more to attract academics. Mainly, we could credit authorship more prominently. The argument that wikipedia article obtain huge readership is not so tough when the readers don't know who the author is. Or, we could approach academics and ask them for reviews. This is something they know, which is a regular part of their work and which they can fit in their tight time tables. But again, there is the problem of how to reward this.
Bye,
Philipp