Psychology Wiki (poll)

An emailer made me aware of a nice new resource: the Psychology Wiki. From the home page:

The Psychology Wiki started on 21st January 2006 and is now one of the largest psychology resources on the internet. We currently have 12832 pages and are working on 8,061 articles and have over 45 MB of content.

Here's their summary of the site's mission:

The Psychology Wiki's mission is to create an online resource placing the entire body of psychology knowledge in the hands of its users, be they academics, practitioners or users of psychology services.

In doing so we are looking to address three issues. Firstly, psychology is composed of different and competing paradigms and perspectives, with researchers in different areas being unable to form an integrated model. Secondly, much of our knowledge is costly to access due to the restrictive nature of the journal-subscription model and the limited availability of free research papers in libraries and electronic databases.Thirdly, current psychology has a pronounced anglophone bias.

We look to work on the first problem by gathering psychology knowledge into one place, so creating a meta textbook. Articles can then be extensively cross linked, easily explaining terminology of one sub-discipline to a researcher in another, facilitating integration and discussion and allowing for the generation of new hypotheses and new theoretical models.

An ambitious project, no?

While I do think using it as a textbook might be difficult (what if some of your assigned readings were changed over the course of the semester? Which version would you test your students on?), it is most definitely an impressive site. Searches for the obvious topics led to impressive, thorough articles (see IQ, color vision, even change blindness).

Searches for niche topics, such as, say, representational momentum, come up blank. Many of the pages also appear to be taken directly from the main Wikipedia (see Wikipedia's IQ page, for example). This is, of course, completely legal, and completely in the spirit of Wikipedia, but it will be interesting to see if the Psychology Wiki begins to develop independently of Wikipedia.

All this brings up an interesting question, which I'm going to present as a poll:

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It is almost incredibly ambitious, but it wounds wonderful. Maybe, someday, we will not have to buy textbooks, at least not for introductory classes. I have mixed feelings about that, but overall, I think it would be a good thing.

I'd contribute to the psychology wiki but for wikipedia, they are free to link to the psych. wiki, it's public stuff after all.

Alain

I think it's a fantastic idea & thanks for the post. I am currently doing a Masters thesis about a self-directed, socially networked organizational model . I find the journals in all the knowledge areas incredibly expensive and difficult to subscribe to. Wikis are superb! (Details of my research is updated on my blog as it progresses - if you want to check it out ;)

I think it's a great idea, and the branching off from Wikipedia seems justified because an article in an academic journal wouldn't be deemed important enough ("encylopedic") to deserve an entry on Wikipedia, and would get deleted. But one could write about the same article on a more niche wiki like Psychology Wiki.

My biggest problem with the project (like all wikis on Wikia, as well as Wikipedia itself) is that the "copyleft" license they choose to use is the "GFDL", which was designed for the licensing of software manuals for open source software projects, and transfers to other projects very poorly. Creative Commons licenses are far and away the best options (or better, public domain), but once you've started a wiki with one license, it's too late to switch.