[WikiEN-l] Historian teaching with Wikipedia

[Charles Matthews]

Marc Riddell wrote:
>> Marc Riddell wrote:
>>     
>>> on 4/16/09 3:44 PM, David Gerard at dgerard at gmail.com wrote:
>>>       
>>>> Academics learning how to massively collaborate effectively.
>>>>         
>>> We have been collaborating very effectively for a very long time. The
>>> results are the substance of this encyclopedia.
>>>       
>
> on 4/16/09 8:07 PM, Delirium at delirium at hackish.org wrote:
>   
>> It varies by field, but my experience (as an academic) isn't really
>> along these lines. I've rarely seen successful collaborations between
>> more than 2-3 professors, certainly not "massive". I mean, you don't
>> usually see an entire Computer Science department working together;
>> often, the people in the same sub-area don't even work together,
>> depending on how closely their visions and personalities match. Of
>> course, many academics "collaborate" with large labs of grad students,
>> but that's a more hierarchical form of collaboration.
>>
>> Of course you're right that the overall body of knowledge has come from
>> a lot of people, so is collaboration of a sort. But it tends to more
>> often be the form of big-chunk give and take, rather than pervasive
>> massive collaboration. Someone will write a journal article; someone
>> else will respond to it or build on it; and so on. But you won't often
>> have 20 people working together to come up with a consensus journal article.
>>
>>     
> I was startled by the statement, "Academics learning how to massively
> collaborate effectively". It sounded like we were just getting the hang of
> it.
>
>   
<speaking as an ex-academic> Depending on the subject, delegation and 
team-work are understood quite well in academia.  The scale tends to be 
controlled (fields tend to split into subfields with of the order of 100 
people who are actually prepared to read each other's stuff, listen to 
technical talks, and so on). Massive as in 1000s doesn't go down that 
well, in fact.  Free-form (as in wikis) seems very odd, at least in the 
light of traditional "guild" criteria of who gets taken seriously. 

Mark, in my opinion, is closer to it than Marc. The historian in the 
subject line seems to understand the requirements quite well for the 
assignments: write a decently-referenced short piece that looks like 
it's on the same planet as the Manual of Style, and then the 
"collaborative" issues (others editing your stuff) should be manageable.

So-called "hostility" to experts is a troublesome one to make stick, in 
my experience. A small fraction of experts show themselves to be out of 
touch with the aims of the project, by the way they edit (incurably). 
More, I'm sure, just don't enjoy the editing: these people probably want 
a ratchet for content that doesn't exist (flagged revs could come 
closer). We have genuine expertise showing itself every day in editing 
on the site, largely unobtrusively.</speaking>

Charles