I'm sure encyclopedias used to have a similarly dedicated staff before Wikipedia came forward as the superior (overall) model of information dissemination.
On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 2:13 PM, Richard Jensen <[email protected]> wrote: > There seems to be a great deal of misunderstanding among Wikipedians how > academe actually works. Piotr thinks a grad student can produce a scholarly > journal. Look at history. In reality it takes hundreds of scholars working > together (almost all of whom are paid professional salaries by > universities.) Printing and mailing costs are only a fraction of the total > expenses for a scholarly journal, so the advantage of going electronic is > small in terms of production costs. > > I talked just now with the editor of ''The Journal of American History'' > --I used to be on its editorial board. It has dozens of editorial board > members and hundreds of unpaid scholars who evaluate articles and write for > it. They are paid not by the Journal but by their own universities to do > this kind of high prestige "service." (History professors are paid for > research, teaching and service--the average salary in USA for a full > professor of history is $83,000 plus 25% benefits.) The Journal has 14 > in-house staff members, who are paid salaries at rates standard for Indiana > University. Most have PhD's or are PhD candidates--that's eight years of > specialized, expensive post-graduate education. Book reviews are a main > role. They read 3000 new books a year and select the most important 600 for > actual review, using a database of 11,000 available scholars. 300 > full-length manuscripts a year are submitted and the senior editors and > outside reviewers narrow that to the best 10%. The staffers do intensive > quality control on the accepted articles and are backed by a major > university library (which is expensive.) They occupy nice offices with > phones & computers etc that are also paid for. The Journal pays travel > expenses for meetings. The output is 4 issues a year with 1300 pages of > high quality scholarship delivered to about 10,000 historians and libraries. > > Indeed anyone can try to publish a junk history journal single-handed and > give it away free; almost nobody does so. The software is there but the > necessary expertise is very expensive and takes decades to develop. It > costs real money to produce the "reliable secondary source" that Wikipedia > wholly depends upon. The question is who pays for it. > > Richard Jensen > > > > ______________________________**_________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > Wiki-research-l@lists.**wikimedia.org<[email protected]> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wiki-**research-l<https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l> >
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