[WikiEN-l] Subscription idea

[Gwern Branwen]

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On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 9:54 PM, Thomas Larsen  wrote:
> Hi,
>
> This is an interesting idea indeed. However, I'm not sure it would
> fly, for two reasons:
>
> 1) I doubt many receivers (of journals, etc.) would be able to
> understand them well enough. Academic papers aren't always easy to
> understand, especially for a non-expert, and they could be, God
> forbid, _misunderstood_.
> 2) Service providers would, I think, be unwilling to catch on to this
> idea, given the low image of Wikipedia in many areas of academia.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> —Thomas Larsen

1) My personal experience would disagree. I am far from expert on
Japanese poetry - I know not a lick of Japanese, and at best I have a
good background understanding - yet I was able to quite profitably
employ a number of papers I found in JSTOR in articles like
[[Shotetsu]] or [[Fujiwara no Teika]]. Academic papers in technical
subjects certainly can be difficult, and I've read any number of math
or computer science papers which are utterly useless to laymen. But
let's beware generalizing that to all papers.
2) That could be an argument for this proposal. 'Perhaps we haven't
been as rigorous and high-quality as you'd like - but we're willing to
improve, if you'll help us.'

- --
gwern
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