Whither the Wikis? - Inside Higher Ed - 2 views
-
“To the extent scholarship in academe is caught up in questions of status, promotion, and tenure,” he says, “then it is slightly misaligned with wiki-style approaches.
-
“For a wiki-based project to succeed within academic culture, I believe it would need to find a way to highlight individual voices in conversation with one another and to reward those individuals for their work, and that just hasn't happened yet
-
Fitzpatrick points to blogs as a new-media invention that satisfies the scholarly desire for attribution.
- ...8 more annotations...
-
So far, no broadly imagined academic wiki projects have really hit the big time. Citizendium, conceived -- by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger -- as a more rigorously fact-checked alternative to Wikipedia , has only managed to push 140 articles through the vetting process since it was created in 2006 (there is a logjam of 14,000 articles in various phases of review).
-
Discipline-specific wikis are moving quickly,” concedes Jodi Schneider, a spokeswoman for AcaWiki, pointing to such examples as nLab, for math and physics, and OpenWetWare, for biology.
-
While scholars in more settled fields might chafe at a bottom-up model proposed by wikis, a new field such as social informatics might benefit from a space where everything that is known can be collected and discussed, the authors say.
-
While it's true that there aren’t a ton of formally wiki-based scholarship projects out there, there are lots of resources that are, if you like, wiki-inspired,
-
the areas where they have gotten the most play in higher education seems to be in classrooms and various administrative apparatuses.
-
Democratic governance bodies, it seems, are more open to attributing work to an anonymous collectivity.