"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 [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
