[Air-L] using wikipedia articles in academic paper

[Nishant Shah]

Dear Stefano,
I think this is something that a lot of us have faced in recent times. As
increasingly, the wikipedia becomes one of the most comprehensive
information archive for certain kind of knowledges, it does appear quite a
lot in citation and references. In a recent paper that I was writing about
digital cinema in Asia (focusing particularly on the phenomenon of Kuso), my
primary definitions of Kuso came from the Wikipedia and it was questioned by
the reviewers across the board.

My editor, however, understood that the wikipedia was the ONLY credible
English speaking source I could find to provide my definition and reference.
Most other knowledge of Kuso that I had was from interviews and
conversations with people. In such an event, I had to footnote the
particular citation and justify why I am using Wikipedia as my source there.

I relate this personal anecdote because I think there is something much
deeper at stake here: The clash between to industries of knowledge
production and the unease over the interplay between the two. I was
wondering if the same 'disappointment' had been registered if we were
quoting from the Encyclopedia Britannica for example? what is it that makes
the larger academic community trust one source as more credible (despite
proven results) than the other? How is it that we can't see the irony of
disreputing web sources in scholarship on the web?

These are more ponderings but well worth investigating, especially in the
context of industries of knowledge production and monopoly of information
that the publishing industry has had for such a long time and is now feeling
threatened by the advent of user generated information spaces.

Warmly
Nishant

On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 3:38 PM, Stefano De Paoli <Stefano.DePaoli at nuim.ie>wrote:

> Hi everybody,
>
> recently I got the following comment from a reviewer of a paper of mine:
>
> " *There is considerable use made of wikipedia and in an academic
> paper this is disappointing. *"
>
> I was thinking, what is the general practice in using wikipedia in
> academic paper writing?
> and are there limits/rules/good practices that you follow, both in
> writing and in review processes?
>
> If for example I am writing a paper on the peer review process in Open
> Source development, I often use wikipedia articles as references for
> technical terms, like "Diff", "CVS" or "Conditional Programming".
>
> Not being a Computer Scientist myself and thinking that the audience
> of my writings won't be composed of Computer Scientists as well, I
> feel that it is good to provide some basic references for complex,
> technical and often obscure terms.
> In this cases I prefer to use wikipedia articles, rather than Computer
> Programming or Operating Systems manuals, because I think that those
> articles are better and can be easily reached by anybody.
>
> On the contrary I never use wikipedia articles as references for
> sustaining an academic argument or as references for authors (e.g. I
> do not use the wikipedia article fo Harold Garfinkel, but I use the
> book Studies in Ethnomethodology; I never use the wikipedia article
> for referencing the "situated action" concept, but I use Lucy Suchman
> book).
>
> So, any thoughts? comments?
>
> S.
>
> --
> Italian Conference on Free Software 2009
> http://www.confsl.org/confsl09/
>
> Stop the numbers game
>
> http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1300000/1297815/p19-parnas.html?key1=1297815&key2=1569876321&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=25586362&CFTOKEN=14513600
>
> My institutional page
> http://www.nuim.ie/nirsa/people/postdocs/stefano_de_paoli.shtml
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-- 
Nishant Shah
Doctoral Candidate, CSCS, Bangalore.
Director (Research), Centre for Internet and Society,( www.cis-india.org )
Asia Awards Fellow, 2008-09
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