Page 21 - October 2010

Fig. 1. Average number of page views for acoustics-related Wikipedia articles. The 15 topics shown here are the arti-
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cles with the highest numbers of views.
lion articles, which range in scope from popular culture to mathematical theorems and everything in between. At the core of Wikipedia is the unconventional idea that anyone can edit the encyclopedia, thus using the common consensus of its active users to establish the expertise on subject. Although questions of reliability and credibility of a topic may arise from time to time, many technical articles are surprisingly accurate, complete, and well-maintained. Central to this method of operation is the concept of “crowdsourcing,” the idea that significant results can be achieved by a large num- ber of people contributing small amounts of work. Consequently, the site has achieved phenomenal success and popularity; current statistics show the site is visited approxi- mately 790 million times per day—more than 9,000 page
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views a second. It would be very beneficial for the Acoustical
Society to adopt this crowdsourcing approach to maintaining online acoustical resources.
It is disconcerting, however, that a fairly significant num- ber of key acoustics-related articles on Wikipedia are frag- mented and incomplete. Many subtopics within acoustics do not have articles, or have articles which are very limited and poorly organized. To understand the lack of clear information, one must merely read the main Wikipedia article on acoustics. There are many glaring omissions: missing technical areas, almost no mathematical formalism, and no mention of funda- mental topics such as radiation, reflection, or impedance. Contrast this to the articles on optics and magnetism, where there are introductory equations and fundamental ideas as well as figures and images to outline more advanced topics. By not contributing to the acoustics Wikipedia page, the acoustics community misses a significant opportunity—the article receives an average of 900 views per day! A more complete and accurate description of acoustics will be easily achieved if indi-
viduals contribute simply a paragraph
or two to articles that are within their
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areas of expertise. (See Fig. 1.)
Alongside Wikipedia, another popular means for distributing infor- mation electronically is the e-book. In most respects, e-books are the same as traditional books, except that no printed materials are involved— the buyer instead receives an elec- tronic file with the contents of the book. E-books are attractive to buy- ers because they are easy to find, very portable (thousands of e-books may be stored on one book-sized device), and instantly available. From an author’s perspective, they’re advanta- geous since copies are not limited and distribution can be immediate and worldwide. In recent years, the release of standalone e-reader devices such as the Kindle, iPad, and Nook have further propelled this format into the cultural spotlight.
E-books seem well-suited to the acoustics community since it is essentially a modern update on a very traditional means of communication. We enthusi- astically note that several books on acoustics have already been made available to purchase in electronic formats from the Acoustical Society of America website. Given the many excellent books on acoustics, we hope that more authors will consider making their works available for purchase as e- books both through the Society and in high-visibility venues, such as major e-book stores. Most importantly, the real ben- efit of e-books is that they will make it easier for students to find reliable, complete information about acoustics on the
internet.
Several classic acoustics works that are no longer under
copyright have been made available as e-books free of charge
9 10 through The Internet Archive and Google Books. These
websites host free e-book versions of Lord Rayleigh’s Theory of Sound, Wallace Clement Sabine’s Collected Papers on Acoustics, and Harry Olson’s Dynamical Analogies, among others. These are great resources, but are not well known or easy to find. Connecting and listing these scattered resources together on a central website will be discussed in detail in the latter part of this article.
An interesting cross between Wikipedia and regular e- books is the open-source textbook—a crowdsourced approach to creating more formal, pedagogical documents that can be edited by anyone and are distributed free of charge. We are aware of two such active projects, one on the Fundamentals of Acoustics11 and another on Engineering Acoustics,12 which are currently at varying degrees of com- pleteness. Again, these are opportunities for every acousti- cian to contribute to a project that will make acoustics acces- sible to interested students.
Our last major topic in online informational resource for
20 Acoustics Today, October 2010