[WikiEN-l] Does openness dull the bleeding edge?

[Delirium]

charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com wrote:
> "David Gerard" wrote
>
>   
>> OTOH, I've often wondered if setting up an academic wiki would be
>> something to attract people. 
>>     
>
> The concept is probably sound. The trouble would be that academia values (over-values, we might say) the expert in a strictly delimited area. So where would the good syntheses come from? 
>   

I don't think all academics would be opposed to collaborating, 
especially on syntheses.  Academia values narrow experts in coming up 
with original research, but there's a widespread feeling, at least in 
some of the sciences, that more summarization/review would be nice, if 
done well.

Indeed I'm aware of at least one wiki set up for that purpose.  In this 
particular case it's to summarize current work on reinforcement 
learning, and set up by Satinder Singh (who is fairly well-known in the 
academic RL community): 
http://neuromancer.eecs.umich.edu/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Main/WebHome

-Mark