Mindful Ink     Life, Living and Productivity

How many times have you heard a professor suggest that Wikipedia is completely unreliable and essentially useless because “anyone can edit it?” Niko Pfund, the publisher of the Oxford University Press, disagrees and is in fact “increasingly bored” by his colleagues’ vilification of the Wiki project. Why?

“The Oxford English Dictionary, arguably the greatest reference work in the English language…found its origins in a wiki model, whereby scholars put out the word to English speakers far and wide that they would welcome hard evidence of the earliest appearances of English words. The response was astonishing…so much so that the building in which the word submissions were kept, called The Scriptorum, began to sink under the weight of all the paper. Wikipedia is here to stay and its evolution will be one of the more interesting publishing and technology stories in the next decade.”

Pfund also suggests that the anti-wiki bias in academia may be rooted in professional self-interest: if regular people can contribute to academic discussion in a meaningful way, maybe academics aren’t so “elite” after all. What do you guys think? Are the OED/wiki models comparable?

“Inside Oxford University Press: Questions for Niko Pfund” [h/t to Wired Campus]