On Thu, 29 Jul 2004 20:04:03 -0400 (EDT) Abe arafi@umich.edu 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.
There's other differences as well. In academia to be a "peer" who reviews an article, one has to have shown at least some expertise in the subject first. In Wikipedia, I can come in and judge the article on black holes by my own misunderstanding of Hawking radiation.
Another point is authorship. Authorship of Wikipedia articles is rather vague. This person writes a line, that one a paragraph. The academia way would be something like one person writes an article, and if someone else has something to say about a subject, that person writes a different article, and both articles are shown when the revelant search word is given. That's closer to Nupedia and such.
Another point with people from academia is that they are judged by their publications. We might change Wikipedia so that the articles are closer to scientific publications in form, but then still there is the problem that what I write today might be chopped up into something completely different by someone else. That might well be too large a difference.
Andre Engels