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Imagine:
An internet site containing a complete account of the psychology knowledge base with the following features:
- Available at no cost
- Unlimited in size.
- Available freely and free to all people in the world with access to the internet
- Located on a set of duplicating servers providing local backup facilities.
- Written in a form that could be downloaded remotely and relocated if necessary.
- Owned by no particular institution or interest group,
- Managed and maintained by the collective efforts of academics, professionals and consumers involved in the field.
- Where each area in psychology is written up to a high academic standard.
- Where all the significant references in a field are documented and linked either to a full text version, or to summaries on the main academic databases (PubMed, PsychInfo etc)
- Where the information was constantly updated. If a research article were published in a journal, or in an electronic arhive, the author would update the knowledge base to reflect the new evidence and provide a reference to the paper.
- Where practitioners could aggregate self help materials, test reviews, case study reports, clinical protocols and policies and more
- Where academics and trainers could develop and archive lecture notes, handout and other support materials - to save reinventing the wheel each time
- Where there was extensive linking between pages so that
- Basic research areas were linked (e.g. genetic studies of depression with neurochemistry of depression, with neuroimaging etc)
- These would be linked to practitioner pages to inform the development of treatments and maintain a dialogue between clinicians and researchers.
- Where consumers could gain information to inform their treatment, provide ideas to researchers and practitioners and develop their own networks with the professionals in the field.
- Provides a site that can be translated into the languages of the world (see Wikipedia whose pages are now translated into some 200 langauges). Through this, developing a truly international psychology.
- Providing in effect a hypertext textbook freely available to all students and trainees in the field around the world.
- That provides a conduit between science and society through which the advances funded by public money can be disseminated to those who have paid for it with their taxes.
In the past attempts to provide such a site have foundered because the size of the task was beyond the resources of any team that could be put together.
Now with the use of the software behind Wikipedia it is possible.
This allows web pages to be updated by a scholarly community who can work together over a period of time to amass all the information.
In effect this is the start of a further revolution in the knowledge economy.
Come and join in this exciting new enterprise at The Psychology Wiki, where all the above is possible at:
http://psychology.wikicities.com/wiki/Main_Page
From here the help and orientation pages will get you started.
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