Fresh means must be found to lure big brains into the world's biggest seminar
Net evangelists are most persuasive when they talk of tearing down barriers to knowledge – of a world where a farmhand can pick up a cheap laptop and freely pick from the freshest fruits of the human mind. A Library of Alexandria in which all humanity held a card would indeed be an institution worthy of Plato's Republic; but try to access contemporary scholarship with the actual web and you get tangled up. While the stated aim of academic journals is disseminating ideas, they throw barbed wire around themselves and keep the interested public out. If charges were needed to keep scholarly bodies and souls together this might be necessary, but contributors, referees and even editors are frequently unpaid. Experts publish in big-name journals to advance their careers, but they are reliably happy to email a PDF to anyone who asks for one, recognising this as the only way to get their papers read. Perhaps the ivory-tower publishing racket will one day come crashing down. In the meantime academics serious about public erudition must consider their options. Wikipedia offers them the same opportunity, and poses the same frustrations, as it does for everyone else. Many heroes do chip in for anonymous glory, as is evident from the briefest glance at the best of the entries. But too few scientists and particularly literary scholars are willing, so Wikipedia is undertaking a survey to get to the bottom of their reticence. Fresh means must be found to lure big brains into the world's biggest seminar.