On 1/17/07, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com charles.r.matthews@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