Abe wrote:
"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.
I've occasionally wished for something like that, since Wikipedia and academia between the two of them take up nearly all of my time, but I think the two have quite different philosophies that aren't necessarily well mixed. Part of Wikipedia's strength is the exact opposite of the prestige and control of resources that characterizes academia: nobody has prestigious bylines on important articles; nobody is appointed executive editor for articles or sets of articles; and so on.
Take for example photographs, which might be the least problematic place to start. Perhaps we should credit people who submit FDL'd photographs in a byline that appears below the photograph (or even in the print version, below the photograph). This would give photograph submitters some prestige in return for hopefully encouraging submission of more good FDL'd photographs. But it could also have downsides: people might start caring about the prestige more about the quality of the encyclopedia; they might care more about whether their photographs are the ones with the prestigious bylines than whether a particular photograph is the best one to illustrate a particular point, and might like inserting their photographs everywhere rather than judiciously inserting them only where they add something significant to an article. With text it seems that the same sorts of problems would be even more severe.
So philosophically I guess I think we ought to keep more to a model of anonymous thankless volunteers than to a model of prestigious scientists. And it does seem to be working so far, so I don't think we need radical changes to encourage more writing.
-Mark