> My experience is 100% to the contrary. By and large, we're not > exclusively laypeople-- often we ARE the experts. Our math articles > are written by math experts, our chemistry articles are written by > chemists, our physics articles are written by physicists.
I think this is definitely true for articles in many of the hard sciences--maths, physics, chemistry, etc.--but many articles in the soft sciences are written only by hobbyists (for lack of a better word). > Plus, however difficult it is to understand articles, it's all the > more difficult to try to write without any access to them, going > exclusively by popular press accounts or abstracts. The results of > having access are almost guaranteed to be better than the current > situation, where some editors do have access, some editors don't have > access, and so it's hard to double-check each other's work. That's true, and you have a point here. If more editors had access to more, reliable content, they would be more able to check one another's work--provided they could understand the content in question. > My experience, however, is that everyone in academia LOVES Wikipedia-- > a few old fogeys excepted perhaps. But people who like to learn love > a giant encyclopedia that's free and has entries on everything. > > Academia loves wikipedia-- they just don't like it when it's used for > something it's not. A master carpenter loves having a power > screwdriver for home repairs-- he just doesn't want to go to his > jobsite and find his apprentices clumsily trying to use the blunt side > of a power screwdriver to hammer nails. I'm not sure you're correct here. Most of academia, in my experience, thinks Wikipedia is useful but flawed. _I_ think Wikipedia is useful but flawed. If Wikipedia didn't claim to be an encyclopedia, and thus claim to abide by all the relevant scholary content standards, it'd be welcomed, I think, in academia. Cheers, —Thomas Larsen _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
