How News Aggregators Help Development Communities Shape and Share Knowledge [pdf]

ctreude.files.wordpress.com

42 points·lainon··5 comments

Respectfully, and I am not an academic, but from my perspective, it appears that it took 7 researchers to interview 22 people on /r/programming, and then write 12 pages about it with the conclusion that if you want to write software, /r/programming has some good news, and that people that use reddit are comfortable in upvoting and downvoting posts?

And you have 49 citations - is this some sort of comedy journal like the onion that I am missing, or did these people just need to do this for homework? And you are sharing this at a programming conference? yikes.

It's more about trying to formalize that knowledge into evidence-supported statements.

Kinda like they mentioned in article, there's tacit knowledge and externalized knowledge. They are trying to condense tacit knowledge in this area into externalized, or formalized, knowledge.

This formalizing of knowledge makes it easier to build on top of it and work with. So while it may seem silly to survey something that is tacitly known, it's also good to formalize this knowledge into something a bit more trustworthy.

Well, an academic paper is basically code; you have a lot of dependencies in there, and if you don't get all your #includes right, it'll likely fail to compile.

Similarly, knowledge management is inherently multi-disciplinary, so there areaot of libraries that need to be referenced. It's often easier (or necessary) to get a domain-specific SME for the topic on the list of contributing authors.

Still not as bad as some hard science papers though.

A scientific abstract exists to summarize the results of a study not to promise the results. This abstract is poor professional practice.

This is why a qualified peer review process matters in research

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