> I wish academic papers were more like Wikipedia articles. I don't think that would be helpful. Scientific development happens in branches, not linearly. The

> I wish academic papers were more like Wikipedia articles. I don't think that would be helpful. Scientific development happens in branches, not linearly. The fact that a field is going in one direction does not mean that somebody won't make a breakthrough next year based on a poorly-cited paper from the 1970s, leapfrogging a whole bunch of studies that happened in the meantime. Most of the time, there is simply no "state of the art" that covers a whole field, and even in limited sub-fields, quite often there is no consensus.