[Foundation-l] Fwd: Re: [VereinDE-l] Bericht zur Verleihung der Zedler-Medaille und Academy

[Milos Rancic]

On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 05:37, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:
> We at Wikipedia are not by ourselves going to reform or replace the
> reward structure of the academic world.
>
> The suggestion I have recently been making, is that when someone in
> the academic world wants to write something general, they publish one
> version under their name , at least on their  own website, but  more
> formally if applicable,  and use another to start or add to or replace
> a  Wikipedia article, and then not get too concerned what people do
> with it in detail, but keep an eye on it in general.
>
> It would really be great if a few people publishing review articles,
> or, even better,  textbooks,  were to do this. they should think of it
> as a supplemental  opportunity to diffuse their work very
> widely--especially in translation, for very few are likely to
> themselves prepare multiple language versions for publication? once a
> good article is in one Wikipedia, others will copy it.
>
> And the response to user case 1 (the deWP article on  Roman (novel) )
> is to suggest to the publisher that they regard it as a rough
> draft--and, of course, to say so at the start.

I would go a step further.

The most important part of the scientific work in relation to the free
knowledge corpus is not their direct involvement in Wikimedia
projects, but the license compatibility of their works. It is even
better for them to make the work on their site and leave Wikimedians
to include the work on one of the Wikimedia projects, as they will be
credited for their work inside of Wikipedia, too.

In other words, much more important part of our work is to spread the
idea and know-how among scientists how to share their knowledge.

At the other side, as time is passing, Wikipedia will rely more on
encyclopedists than on various experts. "Encyclopedists" in our case
are core Wikipedians, those who spend a lot of time on Wikipedia and
who are dealing with fixing articles, maintaining the project etc.

In other words, our recruitment base are not well formed scientists,
but high school students who are interested in Wikipedia (and other
Wikimedia projects) per se. After five years on project, a former high
school student -- probably a university student or even a fresh
employee -- is much more experienced encyclopedist than any regular
scientist who spent his life in research. Simply, a couple of years of
daily dealing with various encyclopedic articles creates an expert in
encyclopedistics.

What do we need to do is to find a way how to educate those high
school students more efficiently. While it is not going so bad -- at
least, our process created the biggest encyclopedia in the human
history -- it could be and it should be much better.

In relation to the scientists interested in free knowledge, we could
make their life easier. For example, we could host specialized
encyclopedic projects for various fields, as well as for various
universities and institutes. Such projects should be driven by
scientists, according to their [mostly social] standards. The only
rule related to those projects should be the license compatibility.
And our encyclopedists would be transferring their works to Wikipedia
and other Wikimedia projects.