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Wikipedia Wants More Contributions From Academics
holy_calamity writes "University professors don't feel their role as intellectuals working for the public good extends to contributing to the world's largest encyclopedia, the Guardian reports. Wikimedia foundation is currently surveying academics as part of a search for ways to encourage them to pitch in alongside anonymous civilians and raise quality. The main problem seems to be the academic ego: papers, talks and grant proposals build reputation but Wikipedia edits do not."
You're asking an academic to write stuff in the same vein as John D Public.
Our Professors tell us to NEVER use wikipedia except as for a citation. Do you think they're going to then go do their edits? If wikipedia wants academics they'll need a nice clean slate for only academics to play in.
Or, perhaps, academics don't see any reasons to contribute to something that'll erase anything they might add because of Wikipedia's No Original Research clause?
Why substitute the word career for the the derogatory term ego?
Most I hear from academics is that they got annoyed with Wikipedia once somebody removes their well explained text, around a subject they know a lot about, once too often.
"Ever since the Phoenicians invented money, there has been only one answer to that question." -- Clarence Darrow
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
[citation needed]
Many academics may not like dealing with the Wikipedia community process. Say you add something based on your expertise, and somebody else reverts it, or says it's not neutral, or not notable, etc. It's like sending everything you do through peer review, except with far more "reviewers" and far fewer actual peers. Reputation aside, I think many would find journal publication to be a more rewarding process.
A few weeks back there was a /. article about there were a sizable portion of wikipedia contributors who were just up and leaving because they didn't want to deal with that anymore.
I wouldn't expect a person who spends their days doing research / classes on their topic-of-expertise to have more patience than anyone else in dealing with that.
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
... their precious time to editing Wikipedia, they should first up find a solution to shield them from the drama some Wikipedia editors, admins and ArbCom members love so much.
More to the point, tenure and promotion depend significantly upon recognized publications. I'd speculate that there is zero incentive for an academic to spend time updating Wikipedia, but the traditional conference/journal/book publication path is required for advancement in the academic career.
To represent the disinterest in Wikipedia updates as "academic ego" is extremely misleading.
Anyone contributing something to wikipedia is bound to get disrespected by the moderators with obvious personal causes.
Being overwhelmed by reverts by random internet zealot while having a degree in the field you are trying to work in can be infuriating and pretty hard to live with.
I'm a professor of mathematics, and in the past I've attempted to contribute to several math related articles on wikipedia. You know what always happens? Someone reverts all my edits within a day or so. It doesn't matter how meticulously crafted and referenced the added material is, my contribution gets removed.
I stopped bothering years ago, and it has nothing to so with my inflated "academic ego", a ludicrous concept itself. If recognition was largely important to academics, they probably wouldn't be academics!
Is "academic ego" a synonym for tenure? I don't think the Tenure and Promotion Board consider Wikipedia articles as either research or service.
Wikipedia's a nice idea, but I find my motivation to contribute has been worn away through exposure to what I perceive to be the petty power politics, the roaming delete squads, the seemingly automatic undo zealots and the feeling that half the time I'm attempting to debate people who are more at home with truthiness and ad-hominem attacks than provable facts and logical discussion.
Sure, I could spend my time helping improve articles on IT security and disaster management. Without the feeling that I'm getting some sort of altruistic emotional glow/motivation from my work being useful to others, I might as well constrain my written work to journals and specific topic forums.
Ph.D. historians (and similarly, all other scientists) really, really hate it when their texts are edited by a highschool dropout who thinks he remembers a history channel feature broadcast three years ago which totally refuted the presented facts and conclusions written by the academic who only studied the subject for a measly twenty years.
Or, perhaps, they have spent weeks crafting thoughtful, insightful articles only to have them needlessly and permanently deleted for being insufficiently notable, or containing original research. I know I'd think twice about any further substantial contributions to Wikipedia until these policies are overturned and a sensible
(ninja'd, but oh well. Guess I'm not alone. ^_^)
Pay them.
Jesus christ everybody doesnt fucking owe you something, even if you are Jimmy Wales.
You fat fucking mooch.
In one area of artificial intelligence I am aware of, case-based reasoning (CBR), academics had been trying to modify the Wikipedia entry for CBR to fix numerous factual errors in the article. Every time someone would fix the article a Wikipedia user would revert the article to the previous version claiming it was the correct version. After fixing the errors over and over, and each time having them reverted, the case-based reasoning community eventually set up their own wiki in order to have a factual reference on the topic. The Wikipedia version is just too error filled and too tightly controlled by someone who does not accept those errors.
Those things keep them employed. The guy with more journal articles and grants is going to get the job over the guy with more wkipedia edits.
they already have their own wiki - arxiv.org. if the wiki guys want it, all fo the info is right there for the taking...
Nearly every time I've contributed to Wikipedia in my area of expertise, my edits have been reverted or mangled. What's the point when there are so many people out there who are out to destroy content because my citations aren't good enough for them (pfft!) or they don't understand what I've written? I suppose I could waste my time trying to defend my edits, but I have much better things to do.
I don't think it is ego as much as them wanting to be paid for their work. Most people edit Wikipedia want to see something they wrote on the internet and feel it is rewarding. Academics already get this. They get paid to write journal articles so they wouldn't see it as beneficial to start doing the same thing and not getting paid.
A founding principle of Wikipedia is the specific rejection of established credentialing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Anti-elitism
Unless the wikipedians explicitly reject this principle, and somehow translate "real world" credentials into sway in the wiki, I don't see why any academic would bother.
Because seriously, that cute little jab at the end reads more like a Wikipederast getting shirty over academics telling Jimbo and arbcom to take a collective flying leap, than it does as an actual criticism of their refusal to get involved.
Sure, I could contribute some detailed articles in my area of expertise - and then I would have to fight a never-ending battle to keep my contributions from being mangled by someone who thinks he understands the subject, but really is barely more than an addled sociopath with an agenda. Been there, done that - never again.
While Wikipedia is a great reference for pop culture, it is not the place for a serious academic articles - not unless some major changes are made to the way articles are edited and administered. I don't see that happening anytime soon.
One of the reasons we know we're smart is we don't work for free, you dopes.
1. Hire a person or two to work @ Wikipedia (I live in town, Jimmy, hire me!) to accept and process documentation from users indicating them an expert on subject matter. So, I submit my PhD in Astrophysics, and I get the Astrophysics Expert flag on my account. I give my resume saying I've been a programmer for 30 years, and I get the Computer Programming expert flag. 2. Use the existing tag cloud-style architecture to tag articles by their subject matter (ie, this article on geostationary orbit goes in Astrophysics). 3. Any edits made by a Verified Expert to an article flagged as being part of their area of expertise must be voted down by multiple Wikipedians before they can be removed.
Research papers, talks, and grant proposals aren't ego. They're what you get paid for. As a tenure track (around here) you have to average about 1 paper a year as your own, or a talk (depends on your field), or both, + supervise grad students who also publish papers. And you pay for all of that with grants which you get from having successful grant proposals. Once you have tenure the 'papers per year' metric drops a bit but the basic 'publish or perish' mantra applies.
Research and writing are work, they take time to do well. If I'm not going to get credit for it I have to do it 'on my own time'. I don't know a lot of people that work for 8 hours a day and then go home and try and do the same thing for another 6 hours for the fun of it. Some profs eat sleep and breathe their work though, but even then, if you have things like families an
With OSS you can contribute, and then write about your contributions or you can 'give it away' (say host on some website) for free. And the author gets credit for both the software and papers written about it. With wikipedia your changes could be tossed if some random admin doesn't like them, or if someone else comes along and decides to change it. Your name never shows up, and you don't get credit for it in any way that would go on a grant proposal or that you can say at a promotion and tenure meeting as meaningful work you've done.
I'm sure if there was a good way to give academic credit for contributions to things like wikipedia it would be a great place for people to start publishing work.
Hello,
I am not a professor, but I have a PhD.
However, I don't want to contribute because of Wikipedia's reputation for arbitrary deletion of good contributions and other mistreatment/discouragement of contributors, such as reversions of good work because some idiot doesn't like it.
I'm perfectly happy to write good contributions for the good of the people at large and no other reward than that, but not if the time I invest is wasted because of arbitrary deletion or other unjustified defacement of what I created.
Wikipedia would be better served by some sort of slashdot-style community moderation than the current Gestapo of people in power at Wikimedia. And if you want to really have quality content, perhaps you should give contributors more weight in the moderation system if they have ACTUAL PEER REVIEWED ARTICLES PUBLISHED ON THE TOPIC.
A brief survey of the other top-rated posts on this topic shows that no one has any confidence in the editors at Wikipedia because of their history of arbitrary actions and misconduct. You listening, Wikimedia? Get it? You have a really serious PR problem that you won't fix without serious reforms of your standard operating procedures.
I really think that some other group needs to copy and fork Wikipedia lock-stock-and-barrel and administer it properly, effectively obsoleting the people currently running it.
And one other comment, I second the guy who said, "Wikimedia, why are you so delete crazy? Are you afraid of runnnig out of bits?" If someone writes something for you, it's a creative work. Keep it, don't kill it, unless it's KNOWN WRONG.
--PeterM
I've seen very few pro-wikipedia comments here but have read many decent wikipedia articles, so I think there may be selection bias going on.
Personally, I have edited various biomedical, biochemical pages and never had any problem. In fact the majority of future modifications only improved upon what I had created. I almost always use wikipedia as a starting point when learning about a subject. Often there is some random fact or connection someone has added to the articles that wouldn't fit well enough for a review article and I would have never thought to check on my own otherwise. Anyone who knows how to do actual research wouldn't really trust even a textbook or peer reviewed article 100% anyway.
I see no problem at all with double checking everything seen on wikipedia before taking it as "fact," this is what people should be doing no matter what the source is. Even if it is a primary source, you need to look at the data and decide for yourself. Of course, if you aren't an expert in an area then it may not be worth the time to double check everything. In that case peer review is more trustworthy than wikipedia, but there should still be a nagging thought in the back of your head that the info is beyond what you should feel "sure" about. Then it becomes important to know your boundaries.
Anyway, I have found reading and contributing to wikipedia a rewarding experience.
If Wikipedia and its current admins had been around in 1890, they would have deleted the entry for Vincent Van Gogh due to "lack of notability". Maybe people who really are expert and knowledgeable don't want to be associated with an "encyclopedia" which routinely deletes genuine information while keeping articles like this
I can't believe no one else has pointed this out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research
Wikipedia, by policy, does not allow any information on their site that is not sourced or source-able. You are not allowed to make a novel point, or connection, to the data that is not made by the source-able information.
What does this mean to academics? Well, we're talking about the very group that writes articles making novel points, and using original research. If you tell them they are not allowed to post any of that information (and you're also not allowed to self-source, with some exception: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SPS#Self-published_sources), except "when produced by an established expert on the topic of the article whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable third-party publications", why would they want to write anything for your website? They could just write the "expert" article, and leave it to John Q. Public to make the Wikipedia article on it.
Wikipedia might have won some contributors - if only they had any mean for people to publish their original works on Wikipedia. "Need references" rule makes sure that no original work, even by accident would land in the Wikipedia.
Also, what scientist would want his work to be later easily edited by just about anybody?
If Wikipedia wants to attract academia, they should start mirroring the sites like arxiv.org, allow academics to publish their works, allow academics to use their real name (and protect the real name).
Otherwise, from perspective of academic, what the spaghetti of links could be useful for? Sometimes it even fails to provide any useful keywords to further the research (aka fight against "tainting"). Articles disappear often so linking to Wikipedia is too unreliable.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
"Maybe it's time for the professors as a whole to grow the hell up."
Maybe the professors are avoiding contributing until wikipedia trolls grow the hell up.
Why spend several hours of your time trying to write a careful, well referenced, measured piece if there is too high a chance that you'll come back the next day to find "u r gay" or something like that splattered all over it? Or somebody with little knowledge of your field picking a fight with you and re-writing your article without entering into measured debate before undertaking the edits? Some professors feel it's not worth the time contributing to a space that may require a lot of time fighting over for little gain. They might feel their time is better spent communicating through other media, say for example contributing to a popular science book, explaining what they are doing on their personal website, publishing in the academic media or doing talks in science festivals. Perhaps they feel the debate is of higher quality in these channels?
Other academics do publish on wikipedia though, some academics do feel it's a place they can share ideas, e.g. in community informatics. Here's looking at you Mike and Larry
Why would I waste my valuable research time/family time/fun time on what is basically a glorified anonymous blog administered by a cabal of sycophants loyal to Jimbo (or out you go), all willing to subscribe to his personal brand of censorship: blocking contributors, locking posts arbitrarily, eliminating non-groupthink. Yeah, no thanks, I'd rather contribute an article to my field. If people really wanted "knowledge," there are these institutions called "libraries," where, allegedly, you can look stuff up for free.
Since when has a University Professors role been "intellectuals working for the public good"?
They are paid teachers. Not paid Wikipedia editors. If Wikipedia wants them to contribute I'd suggest they stop insulting them and instead try and get them to at least submit references to their own papers on topics they are familiar with so other people can then quote out of them or something.
I was wondering if the guys at Wikipedia would volunteer to clean up the junk in my back yard. For free. It may not do much for their career, but hey, my yard could use the help.
I gave-up after contributing content with citations to almost a dozen pages with information I found while working on a book about Charlie Daniels and having every single contribution deleted by a single person. When I about the vandal on the discussion page, my IP address was banned. Wiki really needs to limit the deletionists to a few dozen deletes per day.
I think it's also a question of who wants to be the only adult on a committee of twelve-year-olds where everyone on the committee has an equal vote about what is done.
In writing for Wikipedia you start with no more reputation or respect than the kid who thinks he knows everything. Academics have spent years building reputations so that when they say something people have a basis for respecting their opinion.
So even if you do talk someone into contributing it's going to be hard to get them into the Wikipedia culture, and chances are you'll lose them after their first edit when someone responds with "Nah, your wrong, reverted."
Besides, the people it sounds like they're talking about are the people who tend to produce original primary source material, and Wikipedia by definition does not publish original research. Academics also often have very STRONG opinions about their own work and are usually not necessarily the ones you want to have write an encyclopedia article about their own field of expertise.
G.
All else aside about the roles that academics fill, good look getting them to do it when some anonymous idiot named xxW1k1d00dxx (admin) can just sit and play games with him over all sorts of bullshit. Why would they put up with it?
Dude, where's my packet?
There is http://www.scholarpedia.org/ , a wiki with peer-review that is for now limited to a few domains of physics and neuroscience. It is on invitation only, however.
It don't think it it ego as much as it is professors prioritizing what they need to do. At a minimum, their job requires that they (1) publish, (2) teach, (3) win grants to bring in money for the school. Even for professors who are tenured, they still need to fulfill these requirements. This doesn't even include meeting with students, advising doctoral candidates, reviewing for journals they are published in (i.e. once you pub in a journal you become a reviewer for them), writing personal books on topics, or organizing school/student events.
Professors, in their defense, have a hell of a lot going on. Ego may be the reason why some of them don't contribute, but I think a lot of it has to do with simply being busy. Being a professors (especially a tenure-track professor) is a full time, 7 day a week job.
Carl Sagan quotes get you an automatic +5 on all posts.
As an academic, I edit Wikipedia whenever I see glaring errors in articles about things for which I have a specialty. There are articles that I could contribute but realistically, when it comes down to working on my research or contributing to Wikipedia, I do my research first. It's not elitism - I really like Wikipedia - it's being practical. I have a job to do first. There are a number of articles I want to write but I haven't taken the time to do it yet.
Academics will happily explain their ideas if you give them complete freedom to do so. Ideally this will be a long work that has opportunity to set the background of their work, the problems that they see in their field, and why they think their contribution is worthwhile. Wikipedia does not sound like a medium that supports this freedom, which already exists in the scientific community, as 'papers' and 'journals', some of which are accessible by the public, and nearly all are accessible by academics. To summarize this point, academics already have their playground, and Wikipedia isn't it. We're talking here about a work [Wikipedia] that seeks to best inform the /public/ about the truth, from public contributions.
[As indicated in other posts] If Joe Public then edits such academic works, the author will be understandably furious! That content needs to remain untouched. A different model than Wiki is needed, along the lines of optionally showing structured annotations from the public.
The third point I want to make is that public free-for-alls can inadvertently breed a bias towards a Point Of View. Academia sometimes suffers this in the form of 'groupthink', which is a self-serving tendency to follow the path of least resistance when choosing research projects, where a dubious or problematic path becomes the focus of mainstream research. [for those wondering where I'm coming from on this, I'm thinking in particular of the spectrum of string theories, but this is not the place to make that point specifically].
Egos and charlatans aside, real academics with actual know-how/expertise on given areas are simply not going to use Wikipedia.
Not for any reason except that much of what they'd write would be reverted by some random i-know-more-than-you joe, or some of the entrenched biased "editors".
I love the Wikipedia idea and I still like the site a lot as a whole, but I no longer contribute much mainly because of this. Especially on the non-English wikis.
-- SouNerd.com
When a scientist submits something to an actual journal and receives a bizzare or an uninformed negative response in a review, the editor --- who presumably knows something about the content matter of the field --- will make a reasonable judgment about the quality of the review, and if necessary, the reviewer. Usually this means sending the manuscript out to other reviewers who are known experts and making a decision on consensus and the quality of the arguments. If it looks like a reviewer is not giving useful or insightful reviews, that reviewer doesn't get called any more. If one journal gets a really bad editor who can't be dislodged, then the experts in any given field start submitting manuscripts to other journals and the managers of the first journal start to look into the problem.
In Wikipedia, the editor is often a reviewer. And when such editor/sole reviewer is ignorant, misinformed and stubborn there isn't anything to be done about it. That is problem.
I contributed extensively while in grad school - homework avoidance kind of thing. But now I just don't have time; I see an article that I'd like to improve, but every time I do *anything* I have to stop and think about the 900 things I'm behind on.
Two words: Peer Review. The Wikipedia editorial process is not thought well of because the content is not edited by experts, and no feedback or improvement of hte process occurs. This is why the content is ever suspect, and the cred for those who write it is not enhanced by doing so.
In philosophy, researchers at the top of their field (disproportionately young, but not only) are invited to submit articles to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. And yes, philosophers do put this on their CV and are proud to have an article there. When one of the top philosophers of mind, David Chalmers discovered that his Wiki page blatantly misrepresented one of his central views, he got an account as "David Chalmers" and fixed it, only to be overruled by some undergrad in a state school who thought he owned that page and flamed Chalmers for impersonating someone famous. That would discourage me as well.
Consider the possibility that many academics might actually care about the quality of their work, and not enjoy cavorting with amateurs, madmen and trolls, without any real recourse to solve problems.
There's supposed to be an up-side to academic rewards (both in terms of reputation and money), it's supposed to encourage good work.
I have contributed to and edited several articles pertaining to my field, and once put considerable work into it. I was quite proud with the result actually, felt like I wa contributing something to society. Almost immediately my edits were totally reverted back to their less complete, less true form by some wikiperson who had staked that article out as part of her or his exclusive domain. What's the point? Why should an "expert" contribute if their work can just be vetoed by plebes?
I think many scientists would love to contribute, but those who have just have their edits reversed anyway. Why bother?
Don’t get me wrong. My arguments do not contain attacks of any person or group. I also don’t care at all about how I or others feel about things. I’m simply looking at the things I observed and the logical conclusions I have to make from that.
I may be missing information. I may have made an error in my logic. And I’m grateful for any corrections. But until I get them, this is what I conclude:
Ouch.
I must be some kind of leader... Since Slashdot is following me to the grave.
Professors and adjuncts don't make enough as it is. Wiki siphons money straight to IT. That seems to be the trend lately: content should be free but not the "service" of maintaining IT? Granted, servers cost money, buying keyboards cost money. But if they pay their IT consultants to configure and setup the computers....why not pay for content from "professional" submitters as well? Can't get anymore professional than someone holding a phD.
Academics don't skip out on editing wikipedia because of ego. Academics skip out on editing wikipedia because they don't have time to do so. Most academics who are involved in research spend so much time writing grant applications and doing other critical job-maintaining functions that they simply don't have time to fight with wikipedia editors to try to improve a page - even if it is a page that directly relates to their own work.
If wikipedia wants more academic work, they need to do it themselves. They should spend more time looking for primary sources, and whenever possible obtaining them and citing them properly. In this case, the NIH actually helps wikipedia's cause as a new rule for NIH funding states that NIH funded research must be published in publicly-accessible, no-fee journals (or copies of the same article must be made available freely through NIH pubmedcentral).
So in other words, wikipedia really isn't in the right to be accusing academics of having "ego" issues. Wikipedia is asking for academics to work for less than nothing, as they would be diverting time away from their own working hours (which is often close to around the clock as it is) to do something that does not help them keep their research moving.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I'm sorry, but how is this Insightful? It is a troll post.
Please, moderators, remember: there is no +1 Agree. If a post brings up a new point or sheds a new light onto the discussion, mod it up. Don't mod it up simply because you are support a certain opinion.
Wikipedia doesn't allow any original research. Doesn't it make more sense for the academics to post their work somewhere that wikipedia can cite it? You don't need a phd to paraphrase something and post a link to it...
Jimmy, take your child molester gaze and go
Britannica and other reputable paper-era encyclopedias had a system: they got experts in the field to write the articles. Scientific journals have experts in the field as editors and reviewers to look over the papers submitted. Those methods are not perfect, but they do filter out most of the junk. The way Wikipedia works now, where any random idiot can undo your educated input, you are better off making your own website or pdf, and just pointing to it. Then at worst they can delete the link, but they cannot go in and trash your article.
If they created a layer of "reviewed articles", where once approved it takes more than a random admin or user to undo it, they would get more interest by experts.
Wikipedia doesn't allow original research. There are still people who regularly flag content to delete for not being notable. Once this shit stops happening, maybe academics might feel welcome. But right now, and for the last 5 years, wikipedia has been edited the worlds largest collection of adults with aspergers syndrome.
It's also quite possible - likely, I would say - that it's a combination of ego from the academics and Wikipedia's numerous and indisputable failings. Doing a lot of work doesn't absolve someone from being an arrogant prick, you know.
The main problem is that science is peer-reviewed, whereas wiki is just the voice of the masses.
There's a lot of junk on wiki, unless you're referring to basic primers and gaming guides.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I wonder if you could have a system such as twitter's authentication to denote reputable writers. I guess it would have flaws, since how do you have someone be reputable in one field with interests in editing another outside their knowledge without becoming reputable inherently in the secondary wiki area. Maybe some sort of "degree of separation" where an editor has a reputation of 10 for their 'parent' article, 9 for a direct link, 8 for a link of a link...etc. Of course that would cause some changes in how wikipedia works, but these things do evolve. The idea of applying for a reputation to a certain topic would put most people off, but it could be done.
We want to have pride in our work and receive credit for it. Give us editorial control. Get rid of WP admins, or give us an ability to reject/block admin actions on articles we write. No group of individuals should have authority to override our editorial control of our article. The WP admins as a whole have generally proven that as a whole they really cannot be trusted that much anyways.
List major contributors to every article as major 'authors' on the actual article page. Make that actually mean something.
Give us a way to write an article and approve edits to our article, before they take effect. When someone wants to submit a change to our article, there should be a 24 hour waiting period, the people who are listed as authors should get 5 days to "object" and repudiate, strike down, or accept only part of the change.
If none of the authors object within the 24 hours, and at least one other person approves within 30 days, then let the change go through.
If noone takes any action within the 15 days, and at least one other person on the site who is an author of at least one article on the site vets the change and says it's good, then provisionally accept the change, and after expiration of the period give the contributor instant edit privileges for further changes thereafter; Subject to immediate cancellation of the change if another author of the article objects before the close of the 30 day period. If another author accepts before the close of that 30 day period, contributor gets no special privileges added.
If an author submits a change it's instant. Removing or adding an author otherwise should require unanimous consent of all authors except the requesting person and the person being added/removed; with outside participation in the vote allowed, but not counted. Except a vote where at least 50 outsiders who are approved authors of at least one other article can add authors if there is at least a 75% majority agreement, or block removal of an author if there is at least a 30% minority agreement.
mainstream journalists don't want to write for the National Enquirer. It's not that the Enquirer doesn't have some well-written accurate news. It's that they don't want to be associated with the other things the Enquirer is known for.
Here's how it would work : wikipedia editors would be divided into tiers :
1. Anonymous Users and untrusted logged in users
2. Logged in Users with more than a certain number of non-reversed edits and above a certain number of months old
3. Verified Real name editor
4. Editor with a college degree or verified employment in a particular topic
5. Editor with a PhD in a particular topic or some type of citation showing they are a known world-class expert in a particlar topic
For example, an article on pitching a baseball would be editable by a user considered to be in category 5
Editors in categories 4 and 5 would be given special priviledges in enties tagged with a subject they are verified to have knowledge in.
Any user category at 2 or above would be able to "finalize" a section of an article stating that that section of the article was accurate to the best of their knowledge, and that they did not expect it to change in the near future. That section would be locked to anyone in a lower tier.
For the administrators to verify disputes, these admins would receive +1 to their power level. So to reverse a PhD's Editing you'd need to be in at least category 4.
The background checks to verify credentials would be paid for with some kind of honesty check system. You would be required to put up front the money it costs the wikimedia foundation to do the background check - say, $10 - and you would be refunded the money if your credentials were what you said they were.
Wikimedia would need a larger budget to pay to check all these backgrounds, and would need to find another source of money besides user donations. However, given the central role they already have in acting as a store of knowledge, this improvement, which would substantially increase the quality of some articles permanently, might very well be worth it.
Doing it this way would still preserve the flexibility and freedom of wikipedia for new content - and you could always append something to an article as a new section, editors with powers would only be able to lock sections of an article not the entire thing.
But it also means that if a PhD in math takes the time out of their busy day to explain how to solve a particular type of problem, only another PhD could dispute their work - not some anonymous 13 year old kid or some 20 year old college dropout with a power trip who happens to have wikipedia admin powers.
So far in this thread it seems to be all negative but i have to say i love Wikipedia. Whenever i want to quickly find something out about a topic i'll go to the Wikipedia page first. Sure i'll need to take everything with a grain of salt and follow it up further but in general the articles are a great introduction to any topic.
They are clearly doing something right. Perhaps many of these people claiming things along the lines "arrogant bastards reverted my edits. I know better than them! I'm an academic!" are themselves the arrogant bastards?
All i can say is that Wikipedia works. I personally would never have contributed if contributions weren't easy to make. So to add barriers that force people to show academic credentials (which i do have mind you) would simply discourage people from adding to articles that clearly need some help.
An article that is not checked by an Editor, is not published in a manner where the quality of the article has financial consequences, you will always wonder about the accuracy of the information.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I was under the impression that Wikipedia was intended to be cited from academic works. The experts publish the papers, and the general population reads them, puts them into layman's terms, and cites them properly.
So shouldn't Wikipedia be urging the general population to do more citing?
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Forget egos -- there are plenty of academics out there who would be happy to contribute. The problem is Wikipedia's environment: it's just not one in which we can expect great articles to become better over time. Unless groups of people with specific knowledge of the subject keep a watchful eye on such articles, they simply degrade.
For three years, I wrote over 100 biology articles for Wikipedia and contributed to hundreds more -- including an entire family's taxonomy with several thousand redirects. Despite my lack of an academic background, I did my best to be as thorough and precise as possible, buying many books on the subject, never assuming anything and citing my references per paragraph and often even per sentence. WP even has guidelines to encourage people to work like this.
Unfortunately, simply writing good articles is not enough. WP must be able to maintain the quality of such articles, but it has no mechanisms for this. Instead, articles can decline in different ways, such as the efforts of enthusiastic, well-meaning individuals who insist on contributing despite not having any knowledge of the subject (they often get their information from popular media), or because of simple vandalism (such deeds can go unnoticed if the perpetrators are careful enough not to attract too much attention). In this environment, maintaining article quality -- especially when dealing with relatively popular subject matter -- is an uphill battle. In the end, I spent the first several hours of each day countering vandalism, stupidity and ignorance.
Another aspect of the problem involves WP's own guidelines, which discourage the use of scientific names for article titles. Even to amateur biologists, such as myself, this is insulting. I was perfectly happy to make tons of redirects and disambiguation pages for all of the common names that I could ever find, but I also learned long ago that there is no substitute for scientific names, especially when the goal is to organize hundreds, and even thousands of articles on species that are all closely related. Yet, there exists a group of administrators at WP who are diametrically opposed to the the principle of using scientific names for article titles on biological organisms (actually, the Spanish language WP have seen the light and done this). Naturally, these people do not generally write such articles and have no special knowledge of, or interest in the subject, but that doesn't stop them from having an opinion and continuing to block any change in this area.
So, what do the folks at WP expect? It's not like academics don't know about them (I have yet to meet one who hasn't). It's just that there are some good reasons why they don't take WP seriously. Of course, they could always decide to pay academics to improve their content, but that would go against their basic philosophy. Therefore, I suggest that WP not just beg, but make some actual policy concessions towards the academics and then try asking for their help again next year.
Their editors consider valid sources to be paper media, not the web itself, not my free on-line text books, so I stopped contributing.
I thought I'd provide a few obscure lines of freshman calculus often used in predicting "peak oil" but they didn't want "original research".
Some friends of mine in college created a fake wikipedia entry, and it has stood the test of time. It has absolutely no bearing with reality but has been edited and improved upon by many random 'experts' since then, very few of which have considered its not at all true, even the references are made up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reich_Corps_of_the_Trombone
It's also hilarious and full of in-jokes. But if something like this is allowed, why would academics touch it?
The main problem seems to be the academic ego
The next comment after that usually goes along the lines of "those lazy communist hippie bastards want to brainwash our kids into teh socialism". Anyone who has worked in academia in the past couple decades knows that people who do research spend most of their time in pursuit of funding for their research. They would happily share the results but they simply don't have the time to do so, as they spend around 16 hours a day working on grant proposals, 6 hours working on papers, 4 hours filling out paper work, and 2 hours managing their research facilities and employees.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I can't understand how Citizendium ( http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Welcome_to_Citizendium ) hasn't come up. Citizendium is a wiki, like wikipedia which ranks editors based on subject area knowledge. Everyone posts under their real name and links to a real resume. Who you are determines how much authority / deference you are given with respect to a topic.
Frankly, academics working in Citizendium and Wikipedia citing Citizendium strikes me as a good model to accomplish the goal in a practical way.
"intellectuals working for the public good"? A lot of my professors don't even put any effort into the courses that they are required to teach.
Every time I've tried to edit Wikipedia some snarky editor on a power trip reverts me. Wiki can go to hell with their snobby internet cabal.
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Limit these special accounts to academic e-mails addresses. Then, anyone can cross-reference them to actual .edu web pages and verify their identity in that manner, and call them out if they're shown to be invalid.
You'll still have the occasional bad actor (e.g. from a for-profit school), but nothing nearly as bad as what's happening now.
And I think you meant to say multiple people in the same field for #3, because the way you have it, it's no different than what's happening right now.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
What's wrong with the existing system, where information from academics goes into research papers in peer-review journals and then is eligible to become content (with a citation, no less) on Wikipedia, in a sort of "trickle-down" process?
And it's not a surprise that academics don't want to contribute. Academics is nearly as cutthroat as the "real world", except that it's papers and prestige, rather than cash and capital, that motivates people.
I've always thought teachers should embrace wikipedia as a real life example of how knowledge is accumulated and record.
Each student is required to team up with a partner and add valuable content into wikiapeda. Grades will be based on the quality and depth of information added, and the difference will be used for comparison. Extra credit will be added if the edits remain. (defined some way)
Early students would be expected to start new subjects.
I'd like to see this widely implemented international. Grad students would be expected to add significant sections of their dissertation.
In a few years it would be even more amazing.
I'm a Harvard grad student, and the few times I have attempted to edit Wikipedia articles (in order to correct factual errors) I find my edits being promptly reversed. Haven't tried it since. If they want to attract academics there needs to be way to tell others OMG I GO TO HARVARD IM WICKED SMAWT STFU STOP REVERSING MY $*&%. That, and of course, unlike peer reviewed journals and the like, its intellectual energy that receives no acclaim from anyone you're actually trying to impress...kind of like slashdot.
With the existing censorship and "editor deletism" that exists today ? No way in hell, even if I know that would not affect my domain (QM).
1) because I don't want to reward poor behavior
2) because I have no interrest in potentially see my work reduced to nil out of spite by some idiot.
So Wiki, sorry, but at the moment , no way in hell.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I'm an early-career climate scientist and have edited Wikipedia extensively in the past, although I have generally steered well clear of 'my area' because it is absurdly politicized and overrun by people who cannot be reasoned with and are there to wage jihad on well-established science that doesn't suit their prejudices. That the article on say, global warming, is not a complete train wreck is down to a few brave souls like William M. Connolley, who has the patience of a saint and has been repeatedly dragged through the wiki-courts by the kind of tendentious editors who put me right off the project. The community's boundless tolerance for any ignoramus with an internet connection is its biggest problem these days.
I am firmly committed to public outreach and engagement, and would happily contribute to Wikipedia without need of extrinsic motivation like the prospect of a career boost. That I find my research interesting and think it's important enough to be worth doing is enough for me to want to disseminate it to a general audience. I'm reminded of the wise words of Axel Boldt, an academic who's kept up a steady stream of contributions since the real early days and has a lot of interesting things to say about Wikipedia: "Educators take note: your contributions to Wikipedia will reach many more people than anything else you will ever write." It would be satisfying to think that people who spend their time holed up in the academy communicating via small-circulation journals could contribute the fruits of their enquiry to millions of interested members of the public, so I'm very keen for more academics to get involved.
I do not mind at all the idea of working with people who lack formal qualifications; in fact I quite admire Wikipedia's anti-credentialism, but I abhor the way they so often confuse this with a sloppy attitude to verifiability and a lack of care to uphold basic intellectual standards, of the kind that would not be tolerated when assessing undergraduate assignments. The ideal is that as long as information is well-sourced, relevant, neutral and so on, it can go in, but the reality is a total mess of dubious claims that go unchallenged, often for years.
The 'every edit must go live immediately' mentality has got to go, in my view. A bit of thinking time and sanity-checking before revisions of articles are put on display to readers would do wonders for Wikipedia's credibility, as would some kind of enhanced peer review process whereby the assessments of people with relevant expertise were given weight when deciding whether User:OMG69!!!!'s half-baked attempts at encyclopedic coverage were worthy of inclusion. There are huge numbers of bright 14-year-olds doing great things on Wikipedia, whether on the content, community or technical side. I do not want to dismiss them; I think a lot of them are fantastic. But unlike several years ago when articles were just getting started, the kind of topics where every choice of a word is now subject to prolonged flamewars makes it essential that people who should be reading an encyclopedia instead of writing it take a back seat and be willing to recognize that those who spend their lives getting to know a subject inside-out might just have something more useful to say.
The major criticism of Wikipedia from Libraryland is that there's no peer review. Someone else had suggested flagging users with credentials. I would suggest flagging entries that have been reviewed by people with credentials. The trick is that the flag would have to disappear if substantial edits to the article are made...it would appear in the history, but that's it. Maybe have a tab to make it easier for people to read the reviewed version (before said changes). Convince academia to accept peer review of Wikipedia...that would help. (Wikipedia would also be well-served hiring a whole bunch of librarians. Lots of 'em are available!)
Spekkio Master of War
Academics and students would love to contribute to Wikipedia, but it doesn't help if the whole campus IP range is blocked for editing for several years. =( And Wikipedia is a good reference nowadays. Even Randy Paush claimed this four years ago in his famous 'Last Lecture'
Have you checked out Scholarpedia and Citizendum? They take into account real-world credentials.
or "hot" topics. I had couple of times arguments about some WWII topics with people how read popular history books and consider them as final truth, even to detriment of common sense. That was frustrating and depressive. Another very negative experience was support of the article about promising new tech. That article is under nonstop attack from spammers, promoters and astroturfers, some of them very persistent. That is even more depressive. On the other hand articles on pure mathematical subjects are (almost) never spammed, any arguments are civil and productive, most of edits actually improve subjects and editors don't object reverts if they were pointed to be wrong. That was why I think it would be great to separate wikipedia in two parts - one is purely technical, without any connection to practical applications, for specialists and students, and another - garbage bin of all controversial, political and popular topics.
for math articles. The problem is very common for consumer tech articles, or politics, or history and other "soft" sciences of cause. What you describe is very strange. I did quite substantial expansion for couple of (applied) math articles recently and had no problems at all. Wouldn't it be intrusive to ask what articles/subjects did you contribute to?
The problem with Wikipaedia is that the articles reflect the opinion of anyone who's prepared to sit and watch them, reverting any edit that they don't agree with. I can understand academics, or indeed anyone, not wanting to spend time editing it under those conditions.
"Poor babies don't want to be judged, so they stay locked in their towers..."
Most academics are very keen to engage with the public and their profession is based on critical debate so probably not scared of being judged. Trust me, most academics can argue like fury. After all, your PhD in most countries is based on a successful viva (oral defence of your work, you against experts in your field, several hours long, no breaks, going through your 300 page thesis page by page, in some cases in front of an audience) and conferences are about standing up in front of your peers and arguing your work.
More likely they see other avenues of communicating with the public to be a more profitable use of their time. Everybody's busy these days. Would you prefer to pengage with the public and communicate your work through publishing popular science books and going to sicence fairs, or in a medium where people who don't know your domain sling cheap insults at you?
As for academics not knowing the real world, give us references for your research.
My bias: just finishing PhD in my mid 40s. Been published in a couple of books, couple of journals, been to a few academic conferences. Previously worked in education in inner city schools, worked on factory production lines, being involved in alternative music festivals, travelled round the world and seen a few dozen countries. I think that counts as the real world. But this expression really puzzles me, what is this space that you think people inhabit that is not the real world? What is your definition of the 'real world'? I'd be curious to hear.
Academics are generally fighting tooth and nail to keep their job/tenure/reputation through grants and papers, all of which take up a great deal of time. If we lived in a magical fairy land where intellect was valued and these people had some spare time then I'm sure 99% of them would love to contribute to increasing public knowledge of their field. But we don't.
Just tell them that an article on the Wiki will be the #1 Google hit on that topic within a week. Then tell them that pointers back to their own papers will gain more eyeballs, and thus more funding.
I've used this several times. It opens doors. That's how I got the picture of the:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_dot_solar_cell
In what is now the #1 article on the topic. And the best article too, IMHO.
A fork of Wikipedia exists, with the stated intention of encouraging high quality contributions from everyone, including academics. It's called Citizendium, and it's rather good. No edit wars, no wikilawyering, no deletionism. Everyone should use it and contribute, as it's a real shame it's not more widely known.
Sheesh! I battle to get the academics where I work (a university institute) to even contribute writing in popular format for the organisation's own blog - let alone anything else that doesn't raise their profile and citation index -- in their defence, the university &departments only get government funding for PEER REVIEWED official publications, so writing other things isn't even helping the department AND it's work to write, so I can see why they would rather write for money than no obvious and direct money....
TV Tropes might be the model for the next generation of Wikipedia if we can get past that mindshare barrier to entry. They announce that they still want citations, but that *there is no notability* - a single citation is enough; and perhaps that's what high end knowledge is about. I know, that "No Original Research" is a rough attempt against trolls, but here at the "end of science" where all the easy stuff has been done, we come down to single rare instances that have to take on "common sense".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
That's really easy to accomplish. All you (WP) need to do is three things:
a) Kick out the assholes currently running the show. Nobody wants to put up with them, least of all people with breains
b) Reserve deletion for very, very obvious abuse, empty placeholders and otherwise clear and undisputed cases. Academics hate it when their citations go away. And the instability of online sources is quite a big deal. Wikipedia has the potential to solve the issue because you can link to a specific article version, but deletionism destroys all that because it breaks history (the history is deleted together with the page).
c) Put in patrolling. Some national Wikipedias have had it for years. If some academic spends two hours improving some article, and some geek in his mother's basement comes along and destroys the work, you can bet it won't get done again. Real people with real jobs actually have better things to do then keep taps on everything and participate in edit wars and all that nonsense. Putting all that behind the scenes and changing the page only when consensus has been reached that the new version is better is one way to keep both the openness and the quality control.
In fact, I think if you start with a) then the rest will follow, because it is so damn obvious.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If academics should give over their knowledge for nothing i think also car mechanics, painters and masons should pitch in, preferably close to my home and not on-line.
Some journals are experimenting with this. Normally an author gets limited feedback from pre-press talks at scientific conferences and three reviewers of the paper. (But these are expert feedback.)
It also doesn't help when someone anonymous assumes "ownership" of an article and fights any changes you make to it.
If an IP user is violating policy on ownership-like editing despite having been warned in a civil manner not to, then the IP can be blocked and/or the article semi-protected.
Unless Wiki has done something about the moronic system they have in place that allows people to camp articles and defend them by simply deleting anything that doesn't conform to their exact views
Wikipedia has done something. Please see my other comment.
Wikipedia wants to be taken seriously as an information resource, so the editors delete huge swathes of articles because they aren't "notable", i.e. "a real encyclopedia wouldn't publish an article like this, so get rid of it".
"Notability" on Wikipedia follows from Wikipedia's policy on verifiability. A subject is notable if and only if enough has been published about the subject in reliable sources to make an article. With what part of this definition do you disagree? Do you disagree with how Wikipedia defines reliable sources? Or how do you define "real encyclopedia"?
A problem is you can cite anything that's on the web, no matter how outrageous, and that citation has equal weight to an academic citation and editors enforce equal handling of both kinds of sources.
Any source cited in an article, be it print, paywalled on the web, or free on the web, has to meet the definition of reliable sources in Wikipedia's verifiability policy. But I still don't see any rigorous definition of "a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy" or "a professional structure in place for checking or analyzing facts".
Jimmy Wales (or someone using that login on Wikipedia) once told me I had to cite something in an article when I knew it to be false, because he thought it was important.
Wikipedia doesn't care about the truth, only about verifiability. Its entire purpose is to regurgitate reliable sources.
The problem is how do you cite the January 24th 1982 edition of the Times in a way that others can easily verify?
Others can request a copy through WikiProject Resource Exchange.
as long as some friggin' kid with an obsession can simply revert any edits I make
That's when you report the ownership behavior of this persistent "friggin' kid" to an administrator.
I'm a graduate social scientist and I've been thinking about the concerns raised here for some time. As you'd have noticed, there is a bit of tension between expertise and the broader community. The struggle creates a need to find a means of conveying accuracy and clarity without stomping on the community and people's egos.
A key problem we've noticed with Wikipedia, and others like it, is that it lacks a clear process. So it began with alleged openness but it ended with people allegedly haranguing each other.
Maybe it's partly because some people don't seem to understand that there is more to scientific debate and peer review than just disagreeing with someone (or deleting their comments)- emphatically, evidence is required (and it need not be found in a reputable journal, either). Nonetheless, perhaps the referencing issue is more indicative of the state of the publishing industry - with the exception of things like PubMed, much material requires $ub$cription$ and this is difficult for many university libraries to get around let alone the general public.
Of course, even if untrained people read the source material they would still need to get around the jargon. Thatâ(TM)s half of what going to university teaches. As a psych major, I can recount more times than necessary when jargon has been used confusingly to describe everyday experiences. How on earth are people supposed to communicate concepts like quantum mechanics? Is it any wonder self appointed gurus misuse the term?
Some time ago I developed something that I think can help solve some of these problems. I am more confident about it now hearing everyone's remarks.
But like I said, I'm trained in social science. I'm not a computer programmer, so I haven't been able to go any further. /. is full of programmers, including talented ones that are in it for love not just money. Glad to see it's also full of academics - who I already knew aren't just in it for the money.
So if you're interested in the idea - and have technical as well as academic input - please feel free to contact me via sciartica AT gmail DOT com.
- E.
P.S. This is not a troll, and I don't intend to spam. If you contact me I'm willing to explain myself, but on a public forum itâ(TM)s not appropriate for me to do so for the time being.
God, I hope not. TVTropes started off decently, listing down the major plots, quotes, and character clichés that are found in TV, which was funny and interesting.
It quickly devolved into a hopeless spergtastic listing of every single damn thing under the sun, and is now forever buried under the weight of its own self-importance.
If they want the academics, then I think anonymity needs to be dropped. While there is a lot of great stuff on Wikipedia, there is also garbage. When the sources can't be confirmed, or people can attack and hide, it just doesn't bode well for scholarship. Any person who has participated in 'web forums' knows this. IMO, Wikipedia contributors should be using real identities which are verified somehow... that way at least someone has to stand behind their position... formally educated scholar or not. There may be tons of scholars who don't have degree credentials, but no scholar should be unwilling to stand behind their work. If there is need for anonymity for some article for some reason, there should at least be a verified figure-head for that article that applies scholarship criteria as best as possible before letting the anonymous entry be published (that way, anonymity and scholarship can still be maintained). Bottom line... for Wikipedia to succeed in their goal, they must get the academics on-board.
If anyone deserves mod points, it's the single greatest person on the planet - my new BFF, damn_registrars. I mean, let me count the ways I dearly love this guy.
For one, no one is more reliable. If he's your special friend, he won't miss replying to a single comment or journal entry, no matter what the subject. He's always there, always watching you - kind of like the Judas Priest song "Electric Eye".
The other thing I love about my new best friend damn_registrars is his tireless energy. It's like he's retard strong, only instead of masturbating at inappropriate times he never gets tired of repeating whatever he heard from casually listening to NPR.
He's a snappy dresser, an amazing dancer, loves tickle fights, and his mother hasn't disowned him yet. WHAT A GUY! So here's to you, damn_registrars, a real man of genius.
One of my former graduate students tried to create a page about me on Wikipedia. He said that the page was rejected several times before he gave up. Each time he'd get contradictory explanations as to why the page was not allowed, despite all the evidence that she provided. I have more than a hundred scientific papers, books, several top research and teaching awards, as well as a tenured full professor position at a top-10 US university (and I have contributed to numerous Wikipedia entries). I see no problem if Wikipedia thinks that this is not notable enough. Yet, its rules favor a minor league baseball player or someone who was in a 2-minute sequence in a sitcom. If Wikipedia wants more scientists and academics to contribute to it, it should treat its potential experts with more respect. A possible approach is to establish some sort of "academic expert" category that does both: recognize such an expert as Wikipedia-worthy and get them to contribute on a regular basis to articles within their area of expertise.