[WikiEN-l] Troubling news on Citizendium

[Sage Ross]

On 1/18/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I think the first scenario would still be a major breakthrough;
> > requiring graduate students to write their literature papers for
> > Wikipedia is a whole different beast from (a few idealistic) graduate
> > students writing on top of their other duties.
>
> Wikipedia is written for the layman, a graduate student's papers are
> written for the expert. Writing for Wikipedia requires different
> skills than the ones graduate students are being tested on with their
> papers, and the skills currently being tested are required, so writing
> for Wikipedia would have to be in addition to, it can't be instead of,
> academic papers.
>

There is huge variation in the way graduate student papers are
written.  It would be relatively easy to assign literature papers
where the for-the-expert material and original analysis strictly
separated from the summary-of-the-literature aspects.  It's true that
the skills emphasized in graduate training are different from the ones
needed to write good Wikipedia articles.  But that's a flaw in
graduate training; they ought to be developing the skills to write for
a general audience.  Keep in mind that I'm only talking about
literature papers, which are intended for developing a feel for what's
been written about a particular topic; these are not academic papers
in the sense of potential publications based on original research
(which graduate students also write plenty of).

-Sage