[GOAL] Re: Wikipedia founder to help in [UK] government's research scheme

[brentier at ulg.ac.be]

Sorry, but I disagree with this. 

I understand all the help that celebrities can bring to a cause, but the choice of the celebrity should be wise. In this case, there is a dangerous risk of mixing up concepts.

Wikipedia is, by definition, the negation of peer reviewing. Or, at best, it is considering everyone as a peer to everyone else. 
It works surprisingly well, by the way, in many cases, but it fails completely at times as well. Expurging mistakes from WP (whether they are willingly forged or not) is a very difficult task and it can take forever. And you cannot control everything.

I do not want to engage in a debate on Wikipedia's qualities and weaknesses, but tens of thousands of professors around the world spend time explaining their students why WP, though comfortable (who has never used it?), is a dangerous tool because it makes widely public a lot of informations that have not been reviewed by acknowledged specialists.

Considering how people these days conflate Open Access and lack of peer reviewing, considering our relentless efforts to fight this confusion, I find it dangerous for a government to choose WP's founder as an advocate of scholarly OA.

Bernard Rentier
Chairman, EOS (Enabling Open Scholarship)
http://www.openscholarship.org/jcms/j_6/accueil



Le 2 mai 2012 à 12:47, Jan Velterop <velterop at gmail.com> a écrit :

> Strict logic is not what we win the battle for open access with. Some celebrity involvement is to be welcomed. On a visceral level the success of Wikipedia (not a logical outcome at the outset on the basis of the premises) may well influence the perception of open access.
> 
> Jan Velterop
> 
> On 2 May 2012, at 11:00, Andrew A. Adams wrote:
> 
>> 
>>>   "The [UK] government has drafted in the Wikipedia founder Jimmy
>>>   Wales to help make all taxpayer-funded academic research in Britain
>>>   available online to anyone who wants to read or use it."
>> 
>> I was hoping that the new government might be less star-struck than the 
>> previous one. Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose, it would seem. We really 
>> don't need Jimmy Wales advising on this. The team behind eprints has been 
>> (with minimal funding) developing the technology needed for many years and 
>> there are many academics in the UK much better versed in the intricacies of 
>> UK academic work and life than Mr Wales. Sigh. I foresee another lost couple 
>> of years wasted on this instead of getting to grips with the known problem 
>> and the known solution (including providing better funding for eprints 
>> development to the team that created it and still does the software 
>> engineering for it).
>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Professor Andrew A Adams                      aaa at meiji.ac.jp
>> Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
>> Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
>> Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/
>> 
>> 
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> 
> 
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