Why would John Lott vandalise his own article? Isn't that kind of the opposite of what most celebrities do to their own articles?
Anyhow, I think most academics that are somehow repelled by Wikipedia other than because of the basic concept (many of them complain about how chaotic it is) is because they don't want their work to be mixed and mashed with that of others.
The way it works in academia in general is John Smith writes "An Introduction To Introductions", with all his expertise and theses and opinions and all the basic information organised /his/ way, and then year or two later Jack Doe decides he could do it better (at least in his POV) and writes "Introductions: An Introductory Reader".
They will both have their ups and downs but what John Smith likes best about it is that he has one book that he wrote all by himself that he can brag about and Jack Doe has his own book too and can brag about it unceasingly.
If an article is edited by all the top experts in the field, unless there is some other purpose behind it (ie, a more generalised work where each expert contributes from their more specific area of interest and/or expertise), they will not get as much pleasure out of it, and there is a much smaller chance that they will write it.
This stems from the basic desire of everybody to be famous, at least a little bit in some way shape or form.
There is no Wiki solution to this problem.
Rather than us getting over their problems for them, we should stay exactly as we are and wait for them to change, which they probably will at some point (if we paid a couple of well-known academians in every field a little bit to tell everybody how great Wikipedia is and to contribute some, it would go a long way)
Mark
On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 21:46:29 -0000 (GMT), Tony Sidaway minorityreport@bluebottle.com wrote:
Sj said:
It would be wonderful and appropriate to list contributors at the bottom of each page.
Might be better if this was a "Special:". Unless I see Marvin Minsky's name in the list of contributors to an article to AI, or whatever, the names of the contributors aren't going to help a lot, and I really can't see fripperies like that persuading tenured professors, published authors and so on, who aren't already interested in the concept, to contribute their bits. Having said that, the reason I got interested in Wikipedia was that I was looking up the firearms researcher John Lott. As it happened, a person on an IP number that corresponded to the institute that employs John Lott started to vandalize the John Lott article. An editor subsequently reported on [[WP:ViP]] that the person identified himself as John Lott. Now that was quite a fascinating introduction to the immediacy of Wikipedia and to the organic, self-repairing nature of the system. I was hooked.
It was also nice to see that one or two people I knew from Usenet had found their way here.
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