Wikimania: We need to choose the main stream over our small pool | PLOS OpensPLOS Opens

"The Wikimania meeting is the annual jamboree of the Wikimedia movement. The sessions cover museums, pop culture, politics, technology, communities and tools. Two thousand people have descended on the Barbican Centre in London to talk not just about Wikipedia (or more properly the Wikipedias in various languages) but a myriad of other projects that use the platforms or infrastructure the foundation stewards or take inspiration from the successes of this movement. The energy and the optimism here is infectious. The people around me are showing in session after session what happens when you give motivated people access to information resources and platforms to work with them. From the perspective of academia, or of scholarly publishing it is easy, even traditional, to be dismissive of these efforts. There is perhaps no more pejorative term in the academic lexicon than ‘amateur’. This is a serious mistake. The community here are a knowledge creation and curation community – the most successful such community of the digital age. There is much that they can teach us about managing information at scale and making it accessible and usable. The infrastructure they are building could be an important contribution to our own information platforms. There are tools and systems I have seen demonstrated here, many of them built by those ‘amateurs’, which far outstrip the capabilities we have in the academic information ecosystem. And we don’t come to the table empty handed – we have experience and knowledge of curation and validation at different scales, on how to manage review when appropriate experts are rare, on handling conflicts of interest and the ethical conduct of information gathering. But we are just one contributor to a rich tapestry of resources, just one piece in a puzzle. One of the things I find most disappointing about the STM Association response to yesterday’s letter is the way it perpetuates the idea that it makes sense to keep scholarly publishing somehow separate from the rest of the web ... Now don’t get me wrong – scholarly knowledge is special. It is special because of the validation and assessment processes it goes though. But the containers it sits in. They’re not special. The business models that provide those containers aren’t particularly special. But most importantly the ways in which that knowledge could be used by a motivated community aren’t any different from that of other knowledge resources. And if we don’t make it easy to use our content then it will simply be passed over for other more accessible, more easily useable materials.  This community, this massive, engaged and motivated community are our natural allies in knowledge creation, dissemination, research engagement and ultimately justifying public research funding ..."