Could We "Wikify" Scholarly Canons?

An anonymous reader writes "'We can enormously extend the record; yet even in its present bulk we can hardly consult it' wrote Vannevar Bush in a 1945 Atlantic Monthly article. Nearly 70 years later, academics are still wrapping research in inaccessible journal articles. Might they be doing it wrong?"

PLOS

[rueger]

Admittedly I only skimmed TFA, but the better Open Access scholarly journals seem to be already doing much of what's described.

I'm a big fan of the work for instance. [plosone.org]

PLOS ONE (eISSN-1932-6203) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication. PLOS ONE welcomes reports on primary research from any scientific discipline. It provides: Open-access—freely accessible online, authors retain copyright Fast publication times Peer review by expert, practicing researchers Post-publication tools to indicate quality and impact Community-based dialogue on articles Worldwide media coverage PLOS ONE is published by PLOS, a nonprofit organization. PLOS ONE is run as a partnership between its in-house PLOS staff and international Advisory and Editorial Boards, ensuring fast, fair, and professional peer review. To contact the Editorial Director, Damian Pattinson, or any of the Publications Assistants (who can be found at our contacts page), please e-mail plosone [at] plos.org. To access EveryONE, the PLOS ONE community blog, please visit http://everyone.plos.org/ [plos.org]

Wikimedia != Wikipedia

[Zero__Kelvin]

Don't confuse the Wiki as a tool with Wikipedia. Anybody saying things like "Oh God ... How about "NO". [slashdot.org] is doing exactly that. Wikis are a powerful tool in the right hands when configured properly. There is absolutely no reason why it wouldn't be an excellent idea to leverage the technology in this and many other areas. It is a way to capture content and content history that is searchable, and it can be done with login only access. Right now if you read an article you only get to see what they print. With a wiki you could see the entire history and have far more information at your disposal, including the dead ends explored, etc.

So in conclusion? Oh God no? Nah.

Re:Wikimedia != Wikipedia

[AthanasiusKircher]

Don't confuse the Wiki as a tool with Wikipedia.

A lot of the discussion here doesn't seem to have much to do with TFA. (Surprise, surprise...)

People seem to be missing the importance of "scholarly canons" in the summary. TFA is NOT about open-access publishing (except indirectly). This is NOT about Wikipedia (except perhaps as a model of how to do certain aspects of a scholarly encyclopedia better than Wikipedia).

TFA holds up Scholarpedia [scholarpedia.org] as its main exemplar of a better kind of scholar online encyclopedia of canonic knowledge in a particular field.

That's not the only one out there, and Scholarpedia does have its issues. Personally, I think if our goal is to produce a standard scholarly encyclopedia for a particular discipline (or for many disciplines), we could also take the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [stanford.edu] as a great example of a model project of collaboration by scholars to produce a summary of research and ideas in a discipline...

... and it's been around for nearly 20 years already. Long before most of these other things have existed.

Re:Wait a Generation

[DingerX]

Well, I don't know what part of history you're in, but such a group of neanderthals sound like nineteenth-century Americans. Then again, by your beery name, you could be classical or heaven forfend, 'Renaissance'. No matter. I'd put the matter a little differently: most humanities professors stop studying broadly about the time they get a job. I mean, hell, I'm too busy publishing and running a journal that I don't have time to dedicate to most other things. So that means that, on the whole, their image of the field is fossilized at that moment (and maybe updated by a few fancy theoretical buzzwords).

I'm co-editing a (mostly) closed-access journal that's fairly highly rated in my little field. In many places, scholars are scored according to where they publish, so an article with us is worth (for performance review) four articles elsewhere. That's obscene, and the huge part of the problem is a systemic belief in the "quantification of academic outcomes"; you can't easily answer the question "Is this person good?", so you answer the question "How many articles in INT1-ranked journals did she publish?". The predictable results are: bloating of INT1-ranked journals, increase in number of INT1-ranked journals, and reorientation of scholarship aimed at what those journals are interested in. You can see the same argument, mutatis mutandis with impact factors: if you select from intelligent agents based on a measurement that has some correlation with performance, those agents will perform to the measurement, weakening the future correlation.

While professors may not care about which way the wind is blowing, academic publishers do. So our publisher recognizes that the winds are blowing open access (indeed, many European funding bodies require OA publication when possible), and offers an open-access option. They see the writing on the wall, and the copies of their works on the Russian websites, and the people at conferences with removable hard drives. As academics, scholarly work is the very air we breathe, it is a necessity, and as a group we find an inequality in access to such work more unjust than people making questionably-authorized copies of copyrighted works for their own research. Open Access, like Open Source, is a great idea, and one that can lead to great riches. The challenge lies in transferring the costs of the work: it is in the interests of academic institutions to support OA publications with material and labor, but there aren't many institutions that are willing to hire people to work exclusively on the heavy lifting behind such publications.

Finally, TFA is a scholarly-sounding advertisement for Scholarpedia. As an historian, I don't see how a wiki can function for scholarly work. Put another way, the wiki model is built on assumptions concerning human knowledge that makes it inappropriate for the humanities; TFA furthers these assumptions. The major assumption is that, since we base our knowledge on the field on the work of predecessors, we build upon that knowledge incrementally. One of the major traits of the Social Sciences and Humanities, however, is that we constantly reflect upon the nature of our discipline and, in building upon knowledge, restructure the foundations of the discipline. That means that our criteria for meaningfulness and even truth are constantly changing. So, even when I set out to do something that lends itself to an encyclopedia-style article (which happens occasionally, but not most of the time), I review as much historical data as I can and work through the reconstructions of my predecessors. Inevitably, I can't build on them so much as rewrite them, and I can't rewrite them in a series of edits, but I have to make a single narrative that is my own. Most of the time, however, I'm not writing encyclopedia entries. Encyclopedia entries are not for producing historical arguments, but for guiding readers to those arguments. There isn't a single vision of the discipline, and there isn't even a privileged voice that would express a consensus of the various approaches and interpretations.