On 22 January 2012 23:08, Yao Ziyuan <yaoziyuan(a)gmail.com> wrote:
They can do
what academics have always done: read each other's
published works and go to conferences. If a subject is so obscure that
only a handle of researchers are involved in it, then it probably
isn't sufficiently notable to have a Wikipedia article anyway.
That's exactly an "egg first or chicken first" problem. Great
discoveries almost always come from rarely known ideas.
I don't see a problem. Academia is very good at coming up with new
ideas that start off very small and obscure and, if they prove
promising, grow and become mainstream. It is only once they have
grown, at least a little, that they become appropriate subject-matter
for an encyclopaedia.