On Thu, 29 Jul 2004 20:04:03 -0400 (EDT)
Abe <arafi(a)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