On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 05:37, David Goodman <dgoodma...@gmail.com> wrote: > We at Wikipedia are not by ourselves going to reform or replace the > reward structure of the academic world. > > The suggestion I have recently been making, is that when someone in > the academic world wants to write something general, they publish one > version under their name , at least on their own website, but more > formally if applicable, and use another to start or add to or replace > a Wikipedia article, and then not get too concerned what people do > with it in detail, but keep an eye on it in general. > > It would really be great if a few people publishing review articles, > or, even better, textbooks, were to do this. they should think of it > as a supplemental opportunity to diffuse their work very > widely--especially in translation, for very few are likely to > themselves prepare multiple language versions for publication? once a > good article is in one Wikipedia, others will copy it. > > And the response to user case 1 (the deWP article on Roman (novel) ) > is to suggest to the publisher that they regard it as a rough > draft--and, of course, to say so at the start.
I would go a step further. The most important part of the scientific work in relation to the free knowledge corpus is not their direct involvement in Wikimedia projects, but the license compatibility of their works. It is even better for them to make the work on their site and leave Wikimedians to include the work on one of the Wikimedia projects, as they will be credited for their work inside of Wikipedia, too. In other words, much more important part of our work is to spread the idea and know-how among scientists how to share their knowledge. At the other side, as time is passing, Wikipedia will rely more on encyclopedists than on various experts. "Encyclopedists" in our case are core Wikipedians, those who spend a lot of time on Wikipedia and who are dealing with fixing articles, maintaining the project etc. In other words, our recruitment base are not well formed scientists, but high school students who are interested in Wikipedia (and other Wikimedia projects) per se. After five years on project, a former high school student -- probably a university student or even a fresh employee -- is much more experienced encyclopedist than any regular scientist who spent his life in research. Simply, a couple of years of daily dealing with various encyclopedic articles creates an expert in encyclopedistics. What do we need to do is to find a way how to educate those high school students more efficiently. While it is not going so bad -- at least, our process created the biggest encyclopedia in the human history -- it could be and it should be much better. In relation to the scientists interested in free knowledge, we could make their life easier. For example, we could host specialized encyclopedic projects for various fields, as well as for various universities and institutes. Such projects should be driven by scientists, according to their [mostly social] standards. The only rule related to those projects should be the license compatibility. And our encyclopedists would be transferring their works to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
