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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."
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe it's time for the professors as a whole to grow the hell upMaybe it's time for the professors as a whole to grow the hell up.
Or maybe it's time for morons to realize what professors actually do for a living. Sometimes you take weeks or months of your 'spare' time writing grants. You get a score in the top 6% in your field like my friend just did, and it still didn't make the cutoff for funding in his area. So all that time essentially went down the drain. Now he's writing another grant, to try to keep funding for his technicians, post-docs and graduate students. Oh, and he teaches classes in addition to all the other mentoring duties he has. Then of course there's writing papers for peer review publications. Those things that actually add to your CV and get you recognition in your field.
Think he really wants to spend extra hours of his precious time editing a wiki page, when a 12-year old with an attitude who has been on the wiki longer can just reject his edits or change them? Think again.
My first large scale mathematics-related edits to Wikipedia were also heavily reworked/reverted. Quickly, ruthlessly, and *absolutely correctly* changed. While mathematically correct, they also happened to be written at a level of detail not appropriate for Wikipedia.
Even as a mathematician, I get frustrated sometimes looking at Wikipedia articles from other fields of mathematics that are narrowly aimed at specialists within the field. In some senses an article written by an outsider can be better than one written by a professional mathematician, because it's less likely to be aimed at the wrong audience.
Or, something like Scholarpedia, perhaps?
As an academic (physics prof.), I can tell you this is exactly why I don't contribute. Ditto for the GP post. I spend many, many hours per week educating students and learning more about my field to stay on top of things, not to mention all the years at university. So, yeah, I expect my opinion in my areas of expertise to count for something more than average.
That being said, my domains of expertise are limited, and that is something not all academics are good at recognizing. Being a PhD in one subject doesn't imply anything about your fluency in another (though it sometimes make you *think* otherwise), so even a 'privileged contributor' status of sorts would have to be implemented carefully I think (e.g., I should not be allowed privileged status to edit medical articles, for instance, I am not qualified for that).
If the climate gets better, I'd love to help out. But that doesn't look likely at this moment. Best I can do for now is keep putting out free texts, notes, solved problems, etc. and hope people find them.