[WikiEN-l] Re: Soliciting academic research

[Jakob]

Kent wrote:

> I remember reading somewhere on Wikipedia: that it'd be really nice for
> publicity if we could have a research paper about Wikipedia published in
> a peer-reviewed academic journal. I'm currently a history undegraduate
> at the University of Texas - Austin and would like to "spam" some of our
> school's professors about this. Is there an existing pre-formed letter
> for this purpose or should I author my own? Have there been other
> attempts to solicit academic research by other Wikipedians? To what
> degree of success?

I am currently writing a students research paper on Wikipeda in Library and
Information science. There are a lot of more scientific topics relatet to
Wikipedia in other fields - for instance I would like to see a sociologic study
on Wikipedia users. But history... maybe "didactics of history" or something
like that. You could also compare Memex and other attemts up to Wikipedia (sure
there are some profs working on "internet-history" yet. Just try to make
scientists interested and sooner or later they will write something.

Personally I recommend writing something on your own - its not much more
complicated than writing *good* wikipedia articles - in all cases it is work!
(as long as you are not a prof inventing facts or stealing your students work).
As Robert wrote it should contain something new that you cannot find in any
other encyclopedia or journal article. Getting your article in a academic
journal depends on relations, knowing the style-of-writing in your field and
relations. The scientific community is open but far from beeing as open as
Wikipedia. 

Greetings,
  Jakob

P.S: My paper will be in German first.