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