[Foundation-l] Is popularity a good thing for us?

[David Goodman]

And perhaps the main remaining bar preventing the use of others is our
prohibition on self-published sources. More and more responsible
people working on current topics publish without the conventional
editing, using their own blogs and similar media.

I'd certainly not argue that we should in general use such sources,
but we need to  determine how we can appropriately use them in in
fields where they are a principal medium of communication.

On 12/16/07, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/16/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > So. Plus and minus points of popularity?
> >
>
> <picking one of the minuses>
>
> > - Mass popularity reruits volunteers from closer to the bottom of the
> > barrel.
>
> On the plus side of this coin is we get a much *broader* range of
> subjects from which we can accept volunteers interested in them.
>
> I'll pick an example from several decades past, just so I don't step
> on any currently hot topic issues, and there is less of a danger of
> discussion being diverted from the larger issue.
>
> Some decades past it would have been very difficult for serious
> encyclopedias to get highly qualified academics to write on womens
> studies subjects, simply because there were none. So what they did
> was write about the general subject, such as womens movement and
> the different varieties of feminism, but wouldn't have had any way
> of writing about the broader issues, without severely lowering the bar
> for *formal* qualifications they required of their contributors.
>
> Since the barrier for entry is lower on wikipedia, we are unlikely to
> have lacunae on subjects that are only now pushing through to
> becoming subjects of serious study in academia. This is a continuing
> *first mover* advantage we have on encyclopaedic coverage of
> such subjects. I won't point out which subjects they currently are
> on wikipedia, as I don't think it would serve anything other than
> useless fingerpointing and arguments about inclusion.
>
>
> --
> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]
>
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-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.