[WikiEN-l] Troubling news on Citizendium

[phoebe ayers]

On 1/17/07, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com>
wrote:
>
> "David Gerard" wrote
>
> > Larry Sanger seems to be doing a lot of one-to-one outreach to
> > academia. If he can work out a way for contribution to a GFDL
> > encyclopedia to enhance an academic career, the growth in quality
> > contributions to the open content pool should be fantastic.
>
> The people slogging for tenure will do it? The professors won't delegate
> it to the grad students? The grad students won't be the people who are
> already writing for us?
>
> If Larry gets tenure-track people to believe it will help them, then it
> really might be a breakthrough.
>
> Charles


Ah, this is related to my own dream: that someday the accessibility of the
knowledge resources that you contribute to will be taken into account as an
important quality. Accessibility is recognized somewhat now in the academy
for tenure, but only obliquely -- while the very prestigious journals like
"Nature" and "Science" are also highly-subscribed to, most of the time
people make tenure based on publications that have only seen the light of
day in expensive journals and books that have very few holdings and thus
very few readers. Sure, this is an encyclopedia, and therefore never going
to count for original research for tenure (much as writing print
encyclopedias or textbooks now generally doesn't get you as many tenure
points) but it would be pretty grand to be able to make the argument that
because you're contributing to a world-wide freely accessible resource
you're actually helping thousands more people than you would by publishing
any other way. If Larry or anyone else can help swing the perception of
working on Wikipedia/Citizendium/whatever away from "wasting time on the
Internet" and towards "helping the world learn about my field," that will be
a good thing indeed.

-- phoebe