[Wikipedia-l] send in the academics

Fri Jul 30 02:39:55 UTC 2004

Abe wrote:

>"Academia" is the name for a huge institutionalized process of peer
>review.  Wikipedia is peer review on steroids, so you'd think that
>academics would be clamoring to contribute to Wikipedia, especially since
>academia and Wikipedia both love free expression and open discourse.  The
>difference is, academia is peer review with competition for prestige and
>resources, and Wikipedia is not.
>  
>
I've occasionally wished for something like that, since Wikipedia and 
academia between the two of them take up nearly all of my time, but I 
think the two have quite different philosophies that aren't necessarily 
well mixed.  Part of Wikipedia's strength is the exact opposite of the 
prestige and control of resources that characterizes academia: nobody 
has prestigious bylines on important articles; nobody is appointed 
executive editor for articles or sets of articles; and so on.

Take for example photographs, which might be the least problematic place 
to start.  Perhaps we should credit people who submit FDL'd photographs 
in a byline that appears below the photograph (or even in the print 
version, below the photograph). This would give photograph submitters 
some prestige in return for hopefully encouraging submission of more 
good FDL'd photographs.  But it could also have downsides: people might 
start caring about the prestige more about the quality of the 
encyclopedia; they might care more about whether their photographs are 
the ones with the prestigious bylines than whether a particular 
photograph is the best one to illustrate a particular point, and might 
like inserting their photographs everywhere rather than judiciously 
inserting them only where they add something significant to an article.  
With text it seems that the same sorts of problems would be even more 
severe.

So philosophically I guess I think we ought to keep more to a model of 
anonymous thankless volunteers than to a model of prestigious 
scientists.  And it does seem to be working so far, so I don't think we 
need radical changes to encourage more writing.

-Mark