"Academia" is the name for a huge institutionalized process of peer
review. Wikipedia is peer review on steroids, so you'd think that
academics would be clamoring to contribute to Wikipedia, especially since
academia and Wikipedia both love free expression and open discourse. The
difference is, academia is peer review with competition for prestige and
resources, and Wikipedia is not.
If Wikipedia creates a space into which academic competition can expand,
then scholars will fill it. As soon as some scholars see a way to
pad their CVs or increase their prestige in their field through
contributing to Wikipedia, they will.
How do you create a space where scholars can compete? Since the prizes in
academia are relevance and prestige, and since relevance/presitge are
measured by the number of people who are citing your work, Wikipedia could
allow users to cite scholarly works in articles, and track those
citations competitively. For example:
- Allow users to upload read-only versions of their papers.
- Give users the ability to cite and link to these uploaded read-only
papers from within the text of the Wikipedia article.
- The author of each paper should have his/her own profile. This is where
score is kept. There you'll find:
- the user's "Area of Expertise": a list of the Wikipedia articles which
cite the user's papers.
- A list of users who have similar Areas of Expertise, base.
Just as Wikipedians keep each other honest by checking each others' work,
scholars (and non-academic Wikiepdians) will keep each other honest by
reviewing each others' citations in articles.
The first scholar to cite his work in a wikipedia article will be the
expert on that subject. But, there's no point in being an expert if no
one knows about it, which is why word will spread, and others will follow.
If a subject that applies to a scholar's work does not exist as an
article, then the scholar will have an incentive to write it, in order to
include his/her citation and increase or refine his/her area of expertise
relative to others. Since scholars who are similar can see each other,
once a scholar writes a new article, the others can add their own
citations, to stay competitive on those topics.
Another way scholars can compete is by answering questions from users.
Google's pay-per-use "Ask Google", is interesting, and useful, but
terribly centralized. If Wikipedia allowed users to ask questions to
scholars through Wikipedia, then allowed users to rank the responses from
scholars, then scholars could be ranked relative to each other based on
their ability to answer questions in certain fields. All questions and
answers would be saved and searchable by keyword, or browseable by the
articles it is categorized under, therefore available to other users.
The result would be information on scholars' areas of expertise and
information on scholars' ability to answer questions in that area, which I
think would be important information when competing for jobs.
My basic assumption behind this is: once academics have the opportunity
to get credit for their work, in a way that ranks them competitively to
others in their field, the will do so.
What do you think?
Abe