wedrifid comments on Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently - Less Wrong
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I lament this state of affairs with the subdued passion of a 1000 brown dwarf suns.
It's ridiculous that wikipedia is more structured and useful that most of the academic literature. I would like to start some kind of academic movement, whereby we reject closed journals, embrace the open source mentality, and collaborate on up-to-date and awesome wikis on every modern research area.
Ok, your next task is to figure out a way to make academics gain status by participation in that plan. :)
That is the heart of the social engineering problem at hand.
Programmers gain status by creating and contributing to open source projects, and by answering questions on StackOverflow, etc. I think that is a stable equilibrium, both for programmers and for academics. The question is how to get to that equilibrium in the first place.
First, I think it needs to become generally accepted that the current equilibrium is broken and that there are alternatives. To that end I encourage all academics to discuss it as openly as possible. Once that happens I think (hope) it will just be a matter of high status individuals throwing their weight around properly.
An 'open-source science' original-research version of Wikipedia, perhaps? With everything explicitly licensed under an attribution-required copyright?
Edit - please disregard this post
Seconding the recommendation of following the Open Source model, particularly Stack Overflow. I'm also a big fan of the many OSS-focused IRC channels, where you'll typically be able to find grouchy-but-helpful people to advise you on the fine points of nearly any nearly piece of software.