[Foundation-l] Participation of intellectual professions

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The premises: 1. I just had a short chat with [[Erik Orsenna]], a member of the [[Académie française]] who "loves to learn and pass along knowledge". He's also interested in the adventure of knowledge and in the democratic processes and appreciate being able to tap into the knowledge of the five french Académies he has access to. I asked him if he was aware of Wikipedia and of its participative nature. He did. I asked him why the Academicians didn't participate more and share their knowledge on it. He said that they have no time, that they're busy writing their books. 2. In parallel, I had several conversations with university Professors showing their reticence, distrust or hostility about the free encyclopedia. They discredit the articles when speaking to their students. 3. High level physicists also stay away from it. (for example most of the theoretical information about [[quasars]] comes from the 1960's. Current information on the net is frequently only available through pay-to-read sites.) The interpretation: It seems that the traditional way of handling knowledge is treating it as a good, that is, a resource with a monetary value and ownership. One invests money, time and efforts to obtain it. People who made a career out of it want to recover their costs and make benefits out of it. Some like the prestige of their exclusive knowledge or the authority it confers. The consequences: A. Some feel threatened by the wikipedia model. They don't want it to succeed. They perceive it would question their role, their power and their way of earning money. B. An expert who has synthesized after 40 years of dedicated studies most of the knowledge of his specific domain that is known to humanity will transmit it to a few persons only each year: a few dozens of students, a few dozens of other experts, and a few thousands of passionate readers who buy the vulgarization book. Thus, knowledge is controlled, reserved, limited, slowed down. It will take decades or centuries before the best of what we know reach everybody. The consequences if it were to change: With wikipedia, any expert could reach and teach millions of persons. In ten or twenty years, every literate person with internet access could use an interdisciplinary, edge-cutting database of knowledge for their diary reasoning. The knowledge and understanding of mankind could make giant leaps. Concluding: I think it is important to think how many of the intellectual profession don't collaborate and why. We should search if mechanisms involving the wikipedia and that would benefit their research are possible. We should even think economical models about knowledge that allow the profession to change, in the same way that it is happening with the free software, copyleft, Creative Commons and other alternative models.