[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia: the Journal

[David Goodman]

This is somewhat similar to Citizendium, except their peer-review is
open, as is currently also considered a good practice. they haven't
gotten very far with it, and they seem to have almost all of our
problems in maintaining NPOV.
I suggest we let them develop their model, and we continue ours'.


David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG



On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 7:52 AM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> "This alienates a large number of academics who are already very
> interested in learning about and contributing to Wikipedia but have
> difficulty justifying it as legitimate work."
>
> [[Academia]] claims "...Academia has come to connote the cultural
> accumulation of knowledge, its development and transmission across
> generations and its practitioners and transmitters." So, if that
> definition is OK, I don't see the issue with the fundamental point: WP's
> aims are compatible, though restricted to the transmission. Cue the
> discussion of the relative values of teaching and research in
> universities, going back to the nineteenth century and resolved,
> largely, in the second half of the twentieth century in favour of
> "publish or perish".
>
> Having been an academic, I actually think we should take a stronger line
> on WP's behalf. The transmission of knowledge gets reduced to a trickle
> when the only people who read learned journals are academics, and only
> in their subfield (which may have a scale as small as 100 workers
> worldwide). We should be saying quite clearly something like:
>
> *Academics who feel their work has value can expect to spend some
> proportion of their time on "survey" writing, making it clear to
> outsiders (fellow academics, amongst others) what is happening in their
> subfield;
> *Such work itself ought to be valued properly by those who support
> research, because if it doesn't happen by some or other means, the
> long-term outlook for a research area is affected;
> *Wikipedia has come up with an excellent model for the distribution,
> refereeing, indexing and updating of such survey work. Editable
> hypertext is a real advance on the traditional survey paper.
>
> Charles
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>