Proposal:State of the Art Wikimedia
Every proposal should be tied to one of the strategic priorities below.
Edit this page to help identify the priorities related to this proposal!
- Achieve continued growth in readership
- Focus on quality content
- Increase Participation
- Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
- Encourage Innovation
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Summary
Each page can be and should be at the state of the art in terms of its content. This can be achieved by demonstrating that paywalls only prevent and hinder exploration, discovery, experimentation, and science or medicine regardless of subject.
Proposal
Writing a state of the art page can be accomplished in spite of the paywalls by necessarily verifying through citation within each effort as the page is created. Alternative sources are out there. Verifiable creation of knowledge can be achieved, especially by relating what one is exploring for back to what is currently citeable.
Motivation
There are several motivations for getting wikimedia to the state of the art in each page.
1. Those who receive payment from foundations, industry or government can demonstrate the value of their efforts by improving the quality and currentness of wikimedia pages. The National Science Foundation (USA) requires all of its proposers to demonstrate how they will use their research to teach others.
2. When the first place any one comes to learn is wikimedia, the learning is almost free. Access to a computer with internet servicing is needed and usually costly.
3. When any at the state of the art or very near it need to go that one extra step. Wikimedia is the first resource tapped because of ease of access rather than their library.
Key Questions
Would foundations such as NSF and Max Planck consider funding state of the art in wikimedia rather than or in addition to paywalled journals?
Would wikimedia have to go to governments or other institutions for funding to bring the state of the art to its pages?
Can alternative author motivation be generated when outside funding is politically controlled?
Should Wikimedia, especially Wikipedia, supply sources readily and easily accessable by authors or potential authors or editors to reduce the effort in improving or creating articles or pages, for journals and books (such as Google Scholar) and how to obtain instructions for up-to-date figures and copyright permission?
Potential Costs
The cost in time and effort may be prohibitive. Usually for a private effort to achieve product development requires funding directly proportional to risk. Wikimedia lowers that risk by lowering the cost of knowledge that's already out there but often unpresented, paywalled, or in need of improvement or enhancement.
Reducing these costs is a major objective so that editors, authors, contributors, etc. can do so quickly and easily.
Impact
Knowledge has impact directly proportional to its accuracy, applicability, and currentness. That's the benefit of State-of-the-Art. Within appropriate limits, information is survival, recreation, and necessity.
References
Community Discussion
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