On Jan 6, 2005, at 7:15 PM, Sean Barrett wrote:
NSK stated for the record:
I once saw a professor visiting a Wikipedia article on maths found from a Google search, but he abandoned it just after a few seconds.
Some sections of wikipedia are a horror, and the only way to fix that is to contribute. It was the state of the economics section which finally got me to contribute. Particularly the lack of a good explanation of the IS-LM model.
Another professor has advised us never to cite material not hosted on .edu or .ac.uk or other educational domains.
I think the New York Times has engaged in some poor reporting, but to catagorically deny citing them seems, extreme.
If Wikipedia does not change its attitudes, it will eventually die from brain drain: New, more expertise-friendly and intellectual wikis will emerge and WP's knowledgeable users will just immigrate there.
First you accuse me of anti-intellectualism for saying that academics are poves, and then you prove my point.
Thank you I could not have done a better job.
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.