Stirling Newberry wrote:
But to get back to seriousness: Wikipedia does need to get more friendly to a higher level of information integrity, and it does need to get to a higher level of citation, and it does need to recruit many more people from academia to contribute articles - more specifically, it needs more people who write in their area of profession to contribute. One need not be a professor to write a good explanation of a star scheme, but actually having implemented one a few times will generally be a huge help in writing about them.
Very well said.
There's something interesting about all of this discussion: no serious person in the wikipedia community, no matter where they may fall on the spectrum of "respect/deference to professors" holds the anti-elitist view that Sanger ascribed to us.
If anything, I think we're more elitist than that: we look at academia and say "Yes, pretty good, but we should do better."
This means finding and retaining and supporting the best elements of academia, while ignoring critics who think this means that credentialism is the answer to everything.
--Jimbo