Friday, December 19, 2008

"Publish in Wikipedia or perish"

What an excellent requirement!

1 comment:

Michael E. Smith said...

This sounds confusing, since it is a policy of Wikipedia NOT to publish original research. But given the increasingly heavy role of editors on Wikipedia, perhaps this siganls a change in policy. To me, the use of a Wiki to promote current research (not necessarily Wikipedia) is a great idea.

Scholars in a number of fields are coming to the conclusion that something is needed for nonspecialist dissemination that is more authoritative than Wikipedia yet more rapid and easily available than the standard scholarly encyclopedias. It sounds like the Nature endeavor may be along these lines. It would be nice to have something like this for archaeology, something more systematic and authoritative than the standard blog. But who would have the time or resources to do such a thing?