phoebe ayers wrote:
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.
The problem of accessibility is bigger than the price of journals, or the need for some who want to have their work published need to pay to have that done. The high circulation journals that you mention have their own space limitations about what they can include, so they cannot enter into any individual science with much depth. For the user, even if the cost of a journal can be kept affordable it will only cover one corner of the subject matter. He may need to suscribe to a range of journals. That brings the costs back up, and can also open storage problems. There is an advantage to being connected to a university, and having access to the pooled resources in their libraries, but libraries have their funding problems too. As well, I keep hearing horror stories about runs of old journals being dumped because they don't have the place to keep them. Some of my 19th century bound volumes of "Scientific American" once belonged to libraries.
The Renaissance Wikipedian who is not associated with a university has to make do with what he can find. If all he can find is internet material it will shape and limit his perceptions. Fact checking should be one of our jobs, but doing that effectively depends on having access to information.
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.
Being on the hunt for tenure is bound to affect the way that one edits. If one's institution support's a particular world view he will be motivated to let that influence the way he contributes; not all of his fellow editors will share that world view.
Ec