Michael, do you have a reference/link/isbn for those of us whose interest has been picqued by organisational resistance to innovation?

Tks!

I think most academics would view it this way, yes. Which isn’t to say, like you claim, that it isn’t a superb innovation.

Oh: Ivory is a brand of soap.

This is certainly understandable, as ideas are their main currency.

An academic can get some credit by writing a good review paper, which is a lot like a good wikipedia entry. But without having ownership of that entry — without being able to put it on a C.V. — there’s no credit.

I’ve heard of efforts to build an “expert authored” wiki — I think it’s called…. knol? Don’t know if it’s going anywhere.

But I agree that having some sort of credit associated with contributing to a wiki would attract more academics.

The other discouraging thing, to academics, is wikipedia’s prohibition against original research. This means the person most capable of writing an entry about a newly developing topic is not allowed to do so. If this were allowed, and authors got credit, wikipedia would look pretty different (for better or worse) — and I imagine many more academics would be involved.

Tim Berners-Lee was a programmer at CERN, not one of the physicists. And he encountered major hostility in trying to create it; it certainly was not something CERN was keen to do. Only a few years later did CERN conveniently remember their “role” in creating the web.

So the web seems is an example of a single individual in an academic environment overcoming considerable odds to do something innovative.

In the case of Wikipedia, it’s a social construct of a large group of people, not a single person. In such an inherently social situation, where network effects are important, the systematic suppression of innovation is considerably more worrying.

The truth is innovation -by definition- happens where it is least expected. Yes, scientists missed the Wikipedia phenomenon. But scientists and academics created the internet and the world wide web, while industry sputtered and “didn’t get it” for about two decades.

I recommend “High stakes, no prisoners” by Charles Ferguson, it tells this story well. It is remarkable that most scientists know the story, but haven’t really internalized it.

Regards

Gordon

This may be off-topic, but research scientists *did* invent and build the Web, via CERN. The web is the key enabling technology for Wikipedia. I think of that in some sense as the “hardware” and wikipedia as the “software”. To continue the analogy, many different pieces of software can be run on the one piece of hardware.

I’m not too distressed that one piece of software – Wikipedia – didn’t come out of academia. I’m damn happy that the innovation it represents will transform academia, which likes all power structures has a bad tendency to ossify if not knocked around occasionally.

Cheers,

Andrew

(I don’t know what a soap castler is, and neither, apparently, does Google.)