[Foundation-l] Participation of intellectual professions

[Noein]

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The premises:
1. I just had a short chat with [[Erik Orsenna]], a member of the
[[Académie française]] who "loves to learn and pass along knowledge".
He's also interested in the adventure of knowledge and in the democratic
processes and appreciate being able to tap into the knowledge of the
five french Académies he has access to.
I asked him if he was aware of Wikipedia and of its participative
nature. He did.
I asked him why the Academicians didn't participate more and share their
knowledge on it.
He said that they have no time, that they're busy writing their books.

2. In parallel, I had several conversations with university Professors
showing their reticence, distrust or hostility about the free
encyclopedia. They discredit the articles when speaking to their students.

3. High level physicists also stay away from it. (for example most of
the theoretical information about [[quasars]] comes from the 1960's.
Current information on the net is frequently only available through
pay-to-read sites.)

The interpretation:
It seems that the traditional way of handling knowledge is treating it
as a good, that is, a resource with a monetary value and ownership.
One invests money, time and efforts to obtain it. People who made a
career out of it want to recover their costs and make benefits out of
it. Some like the prestige of their exclusive knowledge or the authority
it confers.

The consequences:
A. Some feel threatened by the wikipedia model. They don't want it to
succeed. They perceive it would question their role, their power and
their way of earning money.
B. An expert who has synthesized after 40 years of dedicated studies
most of the knowledge of his specific domain that is known to humanity
will transmit it to a few persons only each year: a few dozens of
students, a few dozens of other experts, and a few thousands of
passionate readers who buy the vulgarization book.
Thus, knowledge is controlled, reserved, limited, slowed down. It will
take decades or centuries before the best of what we know reach everybody.

The consequences if it were to change:
With wikipedia, any expert could reach and teach millions of persons. In
ten or twenty years, every literate person with internet access could
use an interdisciplinary, edge-cutting database of knowledge for their
diary reasoning.
The knowledge and understanding of mankind could make giant leaps.

Concluding:
I think it is important to think how many of the intellectual profession
don't collaborate and why. We should search if  mechanisms involving the
wikipedia and that would benefit their research are possible. We should
even think economical models about knowledge that allow the profession
to change, in the same way that it is happening with the free software,
copyleft, Creative Commons and other alternative models.
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