Noted during research about Wikipedia: Googling of key concepts today such as democracy, liberalism, socialism, communism, China, India returns links to Wikipedia articles at or very near the top. The discovery isn’t new, but still a reminder of Wikipedia’s growing importance (thanks to Espen for the tip). Given this, is it conceivable that academics – say, a research community of architects or engineers – could pool their resources in a kind of communal effort to improve certain Wikipedia entries? They would of course have to acquire some knowledge about the Wikipedia community’s standards, but couldn’t that be a good investment in the culture commons? I sometimes wonder what professors in different fields think about Wikipedia – or indeed how many of them even know about it.