[WikiEN-l] Subscription idea

[Thomas Larsen]

> My experience is 100% to the contrary.   By and large, we're not
> exclusively laypeople-- often we ARE the experts.  Our math articles
> are written by math experts, our chemistry articles are written by
> chemists, our physics articles are written by physicists.

I think this is definitely true for articles in many of the hard
sciences--maths, physics, chemistry, etc.--but many articles in the
soft sciences are written only by hobbyists (for lack of a better
word).

> Plus, however difficult it is to understand articles, it's all the
> more difficult to try to write without any access to them, going
> exclusively by popular press accounts or abstracts.  The results of
> having access are almost guaranteed to be better than the current
> situation, where some editors do have access, some editors don't have
> access, and so it's hard to double-check each other's work.

That's true, and you have a point here. If more editors had access to
more, reliable content, they would be more able to check one another's
work--provided they could understand the content in question.

> My experience, however, is that everyone in academia LOVES Wikipedia--
> a few old fogeys excepted perhaps.  But people who like to learn love
> a giant encyclopedia that's free and has entries on everything.
>
> Academia loves wikipedia-- they just don't like it when it's used for
> something it's not.  A master carpenter loves having a power
> screwdriver for home repairs--  he just doesn't want to go to his
> jobsite and find his apprentices clumsily trying to use the blunt side
> of a power screwdriver to hammer nails.

I'm not sure you're correct here. Most of academia, in my experience,
thinks Wikipedia is useful but flawed. _I_ think Wikipedia is useful
but flawed. If Wikipedia didn't claim to be an encyclopedia, and thus
claim to abide by all the relevant scholary content standards, it'd be
welcomed, I think, in academia.

Cheers,

—Thomas Larsen