5 ms·
My biggest criticism of Wikipedia is that it refuses to publish anything that isn't supported by a dead tree publication, like the ones Elsevier publishes for a
by inetsee 6y ago
My biggest criticism of Wikipedia is that it refuses to publish anything that isn't supported by a dead tree publication, like the ones Elsevier publishes for a fortune.
You could be a prominent, highly respected full professor, but unless your research paper has made it into one of these publications, and actually gone out the door, your research won't be included in Wikipedia. Wikipedia is great for the kind of stuff that used to be published in print encyclopedias, but if you want to find out about cutting edge research, arXiv.org is a better source.
- ImaCake 6y agoMaybe the wider adoption of arXiv in other fields (taking off in biology right now) will lead to wiki's acceptance of these sources?
- ta988 6y agoThere is a lot of crap on arXiv as well... So I respect the position of Wikipedia editors to have someone vet the information before them. To be fair many editors of Wikipedia have a better understanding of their fields than reviewers (at least in my domain)
- renewiltord 6y agoThat's like the purpose, man. Wikipedia wouldn't be what it was if it didn't do that. In CS, we have these things called DSLs (domain specific languages) and usually one strives to not make them Turing complete because the restrictions give you advantages in reasoning. Wikipedia's strength is that it represents the viewpoints shown by (relatively) famous sources.