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.