February 8, 2007: Thousands of daddy-long-leggers

[bluesdave]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

As a Wikipedia advocate I take this combination of statements to be highly ironic.

Research institutions often post news releases about their research projects, on their web sites. That was what I was looking for, not the research paper itself. Very few of these sites offer archives, so if they have a busy publicity/communications department, the news releases can drop out of sight pretty quickly.

I have only ever quoted a link to Wikipedia if the subject content looked OK to me, and as I have already said, I know that most web users accept Wikipedia as being an impeccable source. I too wish that more of our work was published on the web, but there is very strong resistance to doing this amongst the scientific community. I tried to do something about it, but I was virtually a lone voice.