gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.research

awards Re: - solutions re academe & Wiki

2012-05-24T01:14:51

Hi Piotr, hi all,

Piotr, I like your idea about instituting awards because awards may help younger researchers in particular to 
try something new that their bosses are not likely to have tried out by themselves, e.g. contributing 
scientific or otherwise research-related stuff to Wikipedia

in my opinion, any idea that helps academics accept open science more wholeheartedly will in the long run 
benefit Wikipedia and the wikification of scientific publishing 

On Wed, 23 May 2012 17:48:27 -0400, Piotr Konieczny wrote
[...]

let me illustrate this by an example: two words in your post ("for our respective professions" and "award") 
made me think I might point you to a contest for a scientific award that is currently running, until 31 May 
which is hosted by an open access journal in Leukemia research et al. (Cellular Therapy and Transplantation, 
http://www.ctt-journal.com)

the contest's first phase was run in a discussion forum on the journal's site with a subsequent traditional 
upload of papers to be re

Re: - solutions re academe & Wiki

Janet Hawtin — 2012-05-23T23:50:45

one of my favourite academic minds (Eben Moglen)
speaking about innovation under austerity and disintermediation =)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2VHf5vpBy8

Re: Wiki-research-l Digest, Vol 81, Issue 44

David Goodman — 2012-05-23T21:53:00

The contributions of  highly ranked academics will be given great
consideration if--and only if--they are able and willing to express
themselves within the  norms of the general community, if they accept
the general purposes of Wikipedia,  and if they do not insist on their
own importance.

The ones who are rejected are typically trying to do original
research, or  trying to insist that their own understanding of the
issue is more important than that of others, or expect to be treated
with deference. The well-publicized complaints have often been along
the lines: I understand the issue and you don't, and here are my
credentials to prove it. All to often, "I understand the issue" means
"My particular view"  in a disputed area.  Academics achieve high rank
by doing original research, and by promulgating their theories and
their manner of understanding the issues in the field. These do not
necessarily carry over to what is needed at Wikipedia.

Sometimes, to be sure, they run across a zealot (as do all editors)

Re: - solutions re academe & Wiki

Piotr Konieczny — 2012-05-23T21:48:27

The cited comment might have been a bit over the top, although Brian 
explains it in this thread. I do have to agree with others that I have 
not seen much if any of this hostility on Wikipedia, and even the 
discussion here seems a good illustration that such hostility is rare 
and rather good faithed.

I have seen once an academic collegue I respect a lot leave Wikipedia 
after (he has done few edits) having been accused of spamming (he was 
linking the same academic article on too many pages). The editor who 
warned him was too blunt, my collegue was too annoyed with a simple 
message and overreacted along the lines "so I am not welcome here - 
goodbye", sad but happens. It was, however, the only time I can recall 
that I've seen an academic leave this project.

I'd say that the problem in academia-Wikipedia relation is that there 
are too few academics editing it, and this is because for most of them 
(us...) editing Wikipedia does nothing for our job careers. I am a 
sociologist, and I've written dozen

Re: - solutions re academe & Wiki

David Goodman — 2012-05-23T20:17:58

The approach of getting university resources for Wikipedians is a
necessary one. I've asked the foundation to make JSTOR a priority for
5 years now. This year they responded: they explicitly  dropped it
from the strategic plan as too low a priority.  And to get active
Wikipedians to use existing library collections on their own account
is probably even more difficult.  But it is possible: the NYC chapter
has had  two good workshops with the NYPL, and two with the Princeton
archives.



On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 12:30 AM, Richard Jensen <rjensen< at >uic.edu> wrote:

Re: - solutions re academe & Wiki

WereSpielChequers — 2012-05-23T17:32:47

Hi Richard, you queried in a previous posting whether relations between
Academia and Wikipedians were better in the UK. But I suspect that no-one
is truly in a position to answer that. In both the US and the UK the
situation will be complex, some Academics are Wikipedians, some Academics
judge us by the quality we'd achieved by 2006 and really need to check
again and reassess the project. Some Academics respect and value us for the
way we try to teach today's kids not to cut and paste. Others despair at us
as the source of much of the plagiarism they receive from students.

Of course this is a very different issue to the debate about Open source
freely available journals, a debate where some people on this list have
strongly held and diametrically opposed views. Wikipedia is a Tertiary
source not a Primary or Secondary one and cannot exist without those
primary and secondary sources. So their continued health matters to us, but
clearly there is a divide as to how that continued health is to be
achieved, and

Re: - solutions re academe & Wiki

Brian Keegan — 2012-05-23T14:36:30

To be clear, my rhetorical flourish was not a hostile reaction to the
academy itself (I am a dissertating PhD candidate after all) but to rather
to its members' patronizing attitudes as embodied by Richard's
mischaracterization of Piotr's point and institutional powers' model of
profiting from others' freely-given labor while actively undermining
competing approaches to knowledge production. While there is a
long-standing tension on Wikipedia between openness and credential
fetishism going back to Larry Sanger's (failed) editorial process for
Nupedia, (failed) attempts to institute a "defer to experts" policy on
Wikipedia (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deferring_to_the_experts), and
(failing) attempts to have unpaid experts write and regulate Citizendium,
expanding the academe's participation in Wikipedia is an entirely different
matter from resisting an arrangement in which the actors which add the
least value to scholarship have a tendency to profit the most. To be sure,
open publication models (e.g., Fir

Re: - solutions re academe & Wiki

Felipe Ortega — 2012-05-23T08:28:58

Hi Richard.


Well, it is true that this mismatch exists, mainly due to a different culture clash (academia vs. open distributed production of knowledge).

I wouldn't characterize this as a problem exclusive to Wikipedia. In fact, it affects all communities that follow the commons-based peer production paradigm. Adaption will be progressive, and not very fast, since academia has been following its current procedures since decades ago.


Perhaps the huge success of Wikipedia, and the fact that it was adopted by millions of persons around the world at a very fast pace may introduce some bias in our perception of what is 'scaling up' effectively. For sure, there are thousands of universities and it might not be very realistic to think that 90% of faculties will happily integrate Wikipedia editing in their classes next year. Moreover, there are additional factors that, depending on the case, can make it a bit difficult to succeed in this endeavour (for instance, I'm thinking about "conflicts of interest" create

Re: - solutions re academe & Wiki

Samuel Klein — 2012-05-23T08:15:31

There's certainly a reflex against the Appeal to Expertise. But on
balance I would say Wikimedians have an appreciation and enthusiasm
for academia.  (many active contributors have connections there, as
students, grad students, profs or researchers.)


These are both great ideas.

I believe something like a) has happened at a few universities, if not
at scholarly conventions.  Conventions might reach a cross-section of
hundreds of institutions at once.
And something like b) has happened at various libraries. There has
been interest in doing that in Boston with focus on a particular field
or type of special collection.

Sam.

Re: Wiki-research-l Digest, Vol 81, Issue 44

Ed H. Chi — 2012-05-23T06:07:49


My understanding has been that historically, edits to articles from
academics with strong credentials are not treated any differently than
edits from anyone else.  This has resulted in many academics spending loads
of time editing an article only to be 'reverted' by a single click from a
Recent Changes Patrol, or to be slapped on the wrist with "citation
needed".  This has resulted in many misunderstandings, which often did not
get a chance to be discussed in public, because academics often don't have
time to go round and round with someone on Wikipedia talk page.

I believe the culture at Wikipedia has always been that knowledge from
anyone is treated equally.  While I admire that principle, it doesn't quite
jive with the academic credential culture, where opinion based on
experience and authority actually counts for something.  Go to a faculty
meeting, and you shall see a Full Professor's opinion being weighted more
than an assistant professor just starting out on tenure clock.

There is in operation a W

Re: real scholarship is expensive

Peter Ansell — 2012-05-23T05:03:52

Some open access journals waive the fees for any authors who are not
able to pay, removing this argument as a downside to the producer pays
model for open access.

In the user pays model there are similar fees *per institution* for
having the privilege of limited *access* to some single journals for a
single year, so the argument can easily be reversed. I guess you
already know what happens when you actually try to download all of the
articles for a journal you have *access* to on JSTOR.

Peter

Re: real scholarship is expensive

Richard Jensen — 2012-05-23T04:47:42

Piotr is misinformed. In History it is false that "The work of a 
reviewer does not count towards tenure, or any other reviews; nobody 
puts "I reviewed articles" on their CV."   There are about 4000 
universities in the country--I've taught at a bunch of them from high 
to low (and my spouse has been the dean at several others) so I have 
seen the high respect that administrators have for faculty who 
achieve national visibility by being asked to review. At the U of 
Illinois I and every other professor was asked to list the  service 
roles we played.

As for the authors--indeed a lot of authors are grad students or 
underemployed PhDs who publish because that's the path to getting an 
academic job.  They are taught how to do this in graduate seminars 
led by very highly paid professors.  Making them pay $1000 to $5000 
so their article is open access is a very unwise way to promote their 
scholarship. (Few if any prestigious history journals are now open 
access; this seems more an issue in sciences.)

As

Re: - solutions re academe & Wiki

Richard Jensen — 2012-05-23T04:30:33

Sadly I think this discussion demonstrates some hostility toward 
academe.  (here's a quote from yesterday addressed to me on this 
list: "...knowledge robberbarons standing athwart history imagining 
they and their institutions alone, had the requisite skills and 
expertise to engage in knowledge production. Until they didn't. Enjoy 
your new neighbors in trash heap of history."  I would code his 
emotional tone as "hostile")

Well it's always nice to see people citing the lessons of history, 
especially since I'm a specialist in that sort of OR.   But the 
underlying hostility is a problem that bothers me a lot and I have 
been trying to think of ways to bridge the gap.  There is in 
operation a Wikimedia Foundation  Education program that is small and 
will not, in my opinion, scale up easily to the size needed.  In any 
case the Foundation plans to cut the US-Canada program  loose in 12 
months to go its own way. see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_Working_Group/Wikimedia_Foundation_Role

Re: real scholarship is expensive

Piotr Konieczny — 2012-05-23T04:11:23

The work of a reviewer does not count towards tenure, or any other 
reviews; nobody puts "I reviewed articles" on their CV, and reviewing 
books counts for very, very little. I don't think any number of book 
reviews would equal a peer reviewed journal publication in an academic 
job hunt. Therefore, why there may be some expectation that academics 
are paid for activities that include review, this cannot be controlled, 
and many academics refuse to do reviews, or do it poorly.

Whether the authors are paid is a more complex issue. First, not all 
authors published in the US journals are full-time academics at research 
position. I don't have numbers to cite, but I'd assume that a 
significant minority (20-30%) of articles come from grad students, 
scholars holding primarily teaching positions, independent scholars 
(including those on the job market), and from places outside US (thus 
foreign taxpayers are subsidizing US scholarship; that probably includes 
a tiny but sad percentage of people who publish wo

Re: quality control - bitter feelings towardacademe??

Chitu Okoli — 2012-05-23T03:44:21

Thanks for the clarification about the Journal of American History; I guess I was mistaken.

Responding to your other comment, I am surprised at your frequent jabs at "the bitter feelings that are obvious among the Wikipedians here toward academe". This is not at all obvious to me, and I doubt it is "obvious" to most people on this list. I've been editing Wikipedia off and on since 2003, have been involved in various Wikipedia lists (like this one), and have never experienced this perceived anti-academic sentiment (though I do hear people talk about it sometimes, like you now).

For sure, I don't go about editing and presenting myself as some sort of authority--I assume that any authority I might have should show in my contributions, and I let them speak for themselves (not that I am an extensive contributor--I am not). I've never faced this kind of problem that you refer to.

On the contrary, I frequently encounter the sentiment of trying to get more academics to participate in Wikipedia. Ironically, this v

Re: real scholarship is expensive

David Karger — 2012-05-23T03:38:20

As has already been discussed, journals have real costs that can be 
covered *either* by charging readers *or* by charging writers.   
Scientific publications general have *optional* page charges, which of 
course few people pay.  But they could easily switch to requiring them.

Such a switch would be "cost neutral" for scholars overall: what is now 
spent on reading charges would instead be spent on writing charges.  
There would be some cost shifting for individuals: prolific authors 
would see their costs rise relative to others'.  This seems quite 
reasonable, as the prolific authors are likely to be the ones getting 
grants, which they can use to fund their authoring.  One might worry 
that this is a deterrent to publication.  But on the flip side, it 
removes a deterrent to reading others' work; I'm not going to guess 
whether we net a gain or a loss.  Making publication cost something 
might reduce the prevalence of low-quality publication, which would be a 
big win for all---I think we're much better

Re: real scholarship is expensive

Fred Bauder — 2012-05-23T03:35:58

She said, "Let them eat cake!"

Very inflammatory words; in effect, you set out a revolutionary manifesto.

Fred

Re: quality control

Richard Jensen — 2012-05-23T03:21:35


No, the Organization of American Historians (the sponsor) has its own 
entirely separate office down the  street. The organization budget 
about breaks even every year--there is no "cash cow."

In addition to the Journal of American History there are over 1000 
smaller scholarly history journals in the U.S., typically sponsored 
by academic history departments or historical societies. Of the 
several dozen i know about, all of them are edited and vetted by paid 
professionals.   Probably many of the smallest ones are local affairs 
that are indeed operated by volunteers and cater to a local audience.

What's relevant to Wikipedia is that Wiki editors are not allowed to 
do original research. We are required to base our articles on 
published reliable secondary sources.  In history we do not do very 
well -- Wikipedia is good at military history, mediocre at political 
history and poor at social & cultural history. Despite the bitter 
feelings that are obvious among the Wikipedians here toward academe, 
tha

Re: real scholarship is expensive

Richard Jensen — 2012-05-23T03:01:32

Piotr says "Let me repeat: editors, authors and reviewers are not 
paid"  That's completely false.  They are all paid professional 
salaries by their home universities, and the kind of work they do is 
counted in terms of getting jobs, promotions, pay raises and 
tenure.  Furthermore for the authors of the articles published and 
books being reviewed, the coverage they get in the journals is a 
major factor in their own getting jobs and promotions.  That is how 
the American system works.

Indiana U sponsors a number of major journals and they are very 
pleased indeed with the international recognition this brings.

Why so many highly skilled professionals are required is a matter of 
quality control.  Th Journal of American history accepts only 20% of 
the history books submitted for review, and publishes only 10% of the 
articles submitted.

Yes you can buy cheap "natural cures" for what ails you as 
recommended by a friend, or you can pay $$$ for prescriptions written 
by a real MD and prepared by a real

Re: Access2research petition - the nature of open access mandates

Chitu Okoli — 2012-05-23T01:11:29

I'm glad this conversation was steered back to the original concern that Richard Jensen raised, because I too don't think it has been adequately addressed.

That said, it seems that his objection is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of open access mandates. It seems that he is reacting as if the mandate is for scholarly journals to provide their articles for free (or force them out of business as researchers switch to free access journals), but I think this is a gross mischaracterization. I don't claim to be know the details of every mandate that has been made, but here's what I understand a grant agency open access mandate to usually entail:

*Instead of readers of scholarly articles paying for the privilege to read the articles, the cost of dissemination should be shifted to the grant funding agency.* Thus, whenever a grant funding agency mandates open access publication, it always (to my knowledge) provides funds to cover such publication.

In the petition that Dario posted, there is a

Re: Access2research petition

Piotr Konieczny — 2012-05-23T01:00:06

Thank you for clarifying the issue, I was not aware of the existence of 
the non-profit non-open content journals. Their existence is certainly 
not a crime, and people who help out with them are to be commended; I am 
certainly not endorsing any attack on them (nor am I seeing any here...).

With regards to US funding of education, speaking from personal 
experience, I hear my collegues at the University of Pittsburgh complain 
a lot about how they are being affected (negatively) through recent cuts 
in government funding. How much that can be generalized, I frankly don't 
have time to research right now, but I am pretty sure that not an 
insignificant portion of paychecks that Pitt's professors are drawing 
comes from the taxes on US citizens. Given that, I do find it a problem 
that their work may be locked behind a paywall, be it for-profit or not.

The main argument in criticizing such non-profits, as far as I 
understand it, is idealistic: society (scholars, Wikipedians, etc.) 
would benefit if all res