User:The Onlibrarian

JTLNano@Stanford.edu

I write Wikipedia pages (or sections of pages) for fun. I also edit pages, to keep them up to date with major advances, and add details to highlight important yet obscure things. Maybe, someday, Wikipedia will get to the level of having features that can make textbooks obsolete.

Likewise, I am thinking of ways to make Wikipedia friendly to researchers. Perhaps, we can publish our papers here in the future. That will accomplish the following:

It will make it easier to reference past work, because it is more convenient to link past work on Wikipedia than through the format currently used for journal articles. That will make papers easier to understand for people new to the field. It will cut out the middleman and get rid of the fees of publishing articles along with the costs to access articles. It will make federally funded research, paid by the public through taxes, a public good. Thus, the work will be freely accessible, anytime, anywhere. It will speed up peer-review times and extend the pool of peers to the rest of the world, who can comment on the Wikipedia article. Articles can be initially marked as un-reviewed, and upon approval by several leading researchers, marked as verified and reviewed. It will stop the madness with the journal impact factors, h-indexes, and other nearly arbitrary metrics. Works can be evaluated by proxies for the usefulness of the work (the number of page views, readership, recommends/upvotes, etc.). It will make it easier to write articles, because unlike the formats of various families of journals, the Wikipedia format is universal. It will make analyzing research trends easier, because all the information will be available on an universal platform.

Thus, we have much to gain.