SocialScienceLondon

Disclaimer

SocialScienceLondon is a rigidly-controlled and highly-collaborative collective user account.

Who we are

We are an academic consortium of social science scholars from colleges currently and once part of the University of London (namely LSE, Imperial & King's) - oh, and we have one fellow in exile at the University of Cambridge (Gonville & Caius :-D .

At the time of this text being written, our expertise covers (in alphabetical order) Automotive Studies, History, International Relations, Management and War Studies.

Why we are here

Wikipedia is academically shunned for citations, quotations and referencing due to an (overblown?) belief in the academic peer review process performed only by "truly qualified experts". By definition, the fact that anyone can edit on Wiki and type in hearsay and half-baked knowledge they read in newspapers or in passing tv programmes sends shivers through many uni offices. And frankly, Wikipedia's "anti-elitist" stance when incepted wasn't helping much to endorse it to the professional knowledge worker, either.

Despite these real issues and stupid prejudices alike (and thanks to Google's priority listing), Wikipedia has become the most accessible and broad-scoped knowledge resource on this planet over its past 7 years. For many undergraduate and postgraduate students, it is the first port-of-call when approaching a new subject matter, ahead of opening textbooks, let alone speciality resources. And for an even bigger number of journalists, it has actually become the only source of research visited before authoring and broadcasting their work (which is funny, as many wikipedians paraphrase media outlets that paraphrased original wiki content: that is literally "knowledge recycling!" ;-) ).

This puts Wikipedia under ever greater scrutiny, as simplifications, incorrect entries, omissions and "simpletonish" postings based on copy-&-pastes from newspapers or worse, opinionated blogs mistaken for factual sources, are less and less forgiven and can wield serious damage to common knowledge. We encountered countless times how students have developed an incomplete bias towards a subject matter due to getting infos from unfocused or biased wiki articles that lacked depth or had an emphasis that was too contemporary (which can be good, but also problematic, particularly in light of Wiki being an encyclopedia, not a mere "what's up right now" portal).

What we do

That's why we decided that in the few and narrow areas we believe we verifiably learned and know something about over the past decades, we should contribute it to Wikipedia directly. This can be anything from...

• cleaning up articles featuring too much contemporary group consensus instead of historically correct grasp and context, as should be the case for an encyclopaedic entry,
• clarifying and completing existing articles to make relevant interconnections clearer,
• correct or enlarge articles to fight against errouneous knowledge on and off Wikipedia in order to stop it being perpetuated,
• and to actually create entries for notable redlinks we come across in our fields, as well as for current research that has gained significant notability, created heated debates and caused real paradigmatic changes to the world of academic understanding, learning and teaching.

As we actively work with our students on all this, we hope that our approach has an important didactic dimension to it which we think will be of long-term benefit for the creation of the Wikipedia editors of the future.

We thank all established Wikipedians for the warm welcome we received and for turning a blind eye on initially being unaware of some "wiki-netiquettes" here and there.

_________ SocialScienceLondon (talk) 02:45, 14 November 2008 (UTC) , .