QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Wed 26th August 2009, 2:58am)
QUOTE(Limey @ Tue 25th August 2009, 7:40pm)
Academics really tend to respect other academics. If that's who you want at your encyclopedia, you should be appointing leading scholars to your board, rather than internet businessmen. If the WMF wants to become a serious entity, they should track down an academic heavyweight or two. Of course, those people might actually push for some real change that others would find unwelcome ... who knows. The saddest thing, in my opinion, about the WMF is that of all of the people the person who is in fact the closest to being a qualified scholar is Jimbo himself what with his unfinished PhD. In my opinion, even just recruiting some ambitious Assistant Professor from a major research school would do a lot of good.
Once they got the BLP issue out of the way, perhaps.
Until then, they don't need a Ph.D. to tell them that applying a privacy invasion device to other people, that they wouldn't want applied to themselves (and in fact, have taken serious amounts of time and effor to KEEP from being applied to themselves) is evil.
It doesn't take an academic degree to figure out when somebody is being an asshole. Although if you're the king, it might take somebody like Isaiah to point things out when the person being an asshole, is yourself.
Well it doesn't take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, but it doesn't hurt either. If you aspire to be a serious, scholarly endeavor, it's a good idea to involve some scholars in the process.