A departmental wiki page?

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I was recently struggling with the Columbia University philophy department’s webpage (to see who might be interested in this stuff). The faculty webpage was horrible: it’s just a list of names and links with no information on research interests. So I did some searching on the web and found a wonderful wikipedia page which had exactly what I wanted.

Then I checked my own department’s page, and it’s even worse than what they have in philosophy! (We also have this page, which is even worse in that it omits many of our faculty and has a bunch of ridiculously technical links for some of the faculty who are included.)

I don’t know about the philosophy department, but the statistics department’s webpage is an overengineered mess, designed from the outset to look pretty rather than to be easily updated. Maybe we could replace it entirely with a wiki?

In the meantime, if anybody feels like setting up a wikipedia entry for the research of Columbia’s statistics faculty, that would be great. As it is, I think it would be difficult for outsiders who don’t know us to have any idea of what we do here!

P.S. The political science department’s faculty listing is useless as well. We need a wiki for that one too!

P.P.S. The physics department’s wikipage is pretty useless for a potential student’s purposes, though–lots on history but nothing much on what the faculty are doing now.

13 thoughts on “A departmental wiki page?”

  1. Wikis are typically overengineered and abandoned, too: <a href="https://coral.uchicago.edu:8443/display/slavic/Slavic+Department+Wiki&quot; rel="nofollow"&gt <a href="http://;https://coral.uchicago.edu:8443/display/slavic/Slavic+Department+Wiki” target=”_blank”>;https://coral.uchicago.edu:8443/display/slavic/Slavic+Department+Wiki or <a href="https://www.cs.colostate.edu/wiki/Faculty/Staff&quot; rel="nofollow"&gt <a href="http://;https://www.cs.colostate.edu/wiki/Faculty/Staff” target=”_blank”>;https://www.cs.colostate.edu/wiki/Faculty/Staff
    You'd need people in your department to be pretty committed to improving and maintaining a wiki, probably. From what I've seen (in economics), faculty aren't even good about posting working papers, so working on a wiki might be a lot to ask.

  2. For Philosophy and PoliSci, click the "Biography Page" link and you'll find the research interest listed.

    There's no excuse for the Stat department. The page is awful!

  5. Speaking as someone who just got done applying to graduate PoliSci programs (let me in, Andrew!), as long as the page has links to personal web sites (which have up-to-date CVs and research interests), I think the web site is fine. Columbia's PoliSci site (sometimes) has this. it looks like the burden for keeping up-to-date is largely on the professors, which seems a reasonable approach, they should just be a bit more assiduous in maintaining an informative web page. If you're a prospective student, though, you probably already have some idea of who you might want to work with.

    A listing by subfield is useful to pare out another name or two, but not the end-all be-all. The biggest thing lacking at a lot of schools was cross-listing for methodologists. Even though a professor may work on American Politics for his personal research, you may be interested in working with him due to his methodological approach as an IR student. So that is one thing the Columbia site could improve on.

  6. One of the most annoying practice is for faculty to have a page called "Teaching" which contains links to "Courses" which lead to a walled-off sign-in page for students. I highly doubt that any student in these courses would routinely click to the course homepage through the professor's Teaching page. It's very uninviting to curious people like me who just want to learn from these professors. Who are these pages created for?

  7. You know what makes the directory page extra class? What makes it clear that it is well maintained and cared for?

    The incosistent formatting of phone numbers.

    See that, I know that I'll find accurate information. I just KNOW.

  9. I think you mostly answered your own question. You've been maintaining a substantial web presence for several years and you've only just noticed this. That's not a criticism, at all, just a fair measure of how important these pages really are. I know the issue is supposedly how helpful such pages are to outsiders, but life is too short to keep everything up-to-date and perfect. The typical academic analysis is, Yes, there is a problem, which somebody else should solve because I am too busy.

    40 years when my cohort was applying to start university in Britain the head teacher of my school warned with a gleam in his eye that the weaker universities had the glossier and better illustrated prospectuses. Different media, same story.

  12. A bit of an understatement on the Vanderbilt wiki?

    The biostatistics department was created in 2003 under the leadership of Frank Harrell and has grown significantly since then.

    K?

  13. Nick – importance can change?

    Different media, maybe different story.

    The ability to quickly grasp and interact with others ideas seems to be changing.

    For instance, I distinctly remember about ten years ago waiting until I was in Toronto to read someone's papers that where not readily accessible in Ottawa (ok I could have done it by inter-library request). We later published a few things together, so it ended up being important.

    Those glossier and better illustrated prospectuses did not affect immediate interactiveness – that student who is the brightest (with respect to your particular research challenges) – would not be likelier to find you.

    Yes, and it likely needs a facilitator to work (actually my wife did that once and the challenge was to regularily pull info out of the faculty)

    K?

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