Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Fri, 16 Feb 2007 09:05:44 -0800 (PST), Ken
Arromdee
<arromdee(a)rahul.net> wrote:
This is a special case of a fundamental problem
with Wikipedia: the demand
for sources and notability produces a heavy bias towards things which are on
the Internet and can be easily found.
It's called FUTON bias and it doesn't only affect Wikipedia.
In some corners of academia, particularly computer science, this is
sometimes seen as a positive phenomenon. Papers freely available on the
internet are cited more frequently (controlling for other factors) than
papers that are only available in print or from pay archives [1]. This
provides a nice bit of pressure for authors to put their papers on their
homepages, and for journals to make their archives publicly accessible.
That pressure has been successful in a number of cases (e.g. the
editorial board of the journal _Machine Learning_ resigning en masse to
support an open-access alternative [2], which pressured _Machine
Learning_ itself into making many of its own archives freely available
online). The result is more information available to everyone, not only
the wealthy or those who have affiliations with wealthy first-world
universities---a goal that seems rather in keeping with Wikipedia's spirit.
-Mark
[1] S. Lawrence. Online or invisible? _Nature_ 411, 2001. Online
version:
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/online-nature01/
[2] Editorial Board of the Kluwer Journal, Machine Learning: Resignation
Letter. _SIGIR Forum_ 35(2), 2001. Online version:
http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigir/forum/F2001/sigirFall01Letters.html