Editing Wikipedia Helps Professor Attain Tenure

Hugh Pickens writes "Lianna Davis writes in Watching the Watchers that Michel Aaij has won tenure in the Department of English and Philosophy at Auburn University Montgomery in Alabama in part because of the more than 60,000 edits ... he's written for Wikipedia. ... Aaij felt that his contributions to Wikipedia merited mention in his tenure portfolio and a few weeks before the portfolio was due two of his colleagues suggested, after they had heard him talk once or twice about the peer-review process for a Good Article, that he should include it under 'research' as well as 'service.'"

Auburn, too bad, not a model program

[supercrisp]

It's too bad that this happened at Auburn, as it's often otherwise a negative example. It is, after all, the school where a prof. recently bowdlerized Huck Finn by editing out the word "nigger," a moved decried by people a sensitive to race issues as Ishmael Reed. Now that's "scholarship" you don't want to imitate. I could offer further reasons that no program wants to imitate Auburn, but saying too much would cause problems for friends.

Re:WP:OWN

[Moryath]

Well, here's a great case study [livejournal.com] from the former wikipedia admin I referred you to earlier.

Most interesting is the old "Enviroknot" case, where an editor whose edit contribution list was nothing but positive got lumped in with two trolls via "secret evidence" and banned... mostly because he crossed an editor named "Yuber", who was a protectionate of the abusive bitch SlimVirgin at the time. They had fun for the next two years accusing dozens of editors of being "Enviroknot" and banning them without any evidence or proof. [wikipedia.org] At one point, an editor named "Dreamguy" who has major [[WP:OWN]] issues concerning fantasy creature subjects (vampires, werewolves, etc) started accusing all his opposition of being "enviroknot"... simply to gain an advantage. As you can see looking at the history of some of the bans (Devilbat, Pukachu, CountPointercount) shows no editing pattern to corroborate, but simply a pattern of abusive users and admins using the accusation as a tool because it was an easy way to get that hair-trigger douchebag David Gerard, one of the worst "editors" ever to disgrace the encyclopedia, to issue a ban.