Template:Psy Wiki Vision(3)

The Psychology Wiki's mission is to create an online resource that places the entire body of psychology knowledge in the hands of its users, be they academics, practitioners or people using psychology to improve their own mental health or wellbeing.

There are two problems with the current state of the science. Primarily; psychology is composed of different and competing paradigms and perspectives, with researchers in different areas being unable to form an integrated model. 'In addition to this; the vast majority of the knowledge is unaccessible to to the restrictive nature of journal-subscription and limited availability of research papers in libraries and electronic databases. This secondary problem contributes to the primary problem. By gathering the entirety of psychology knowledge in to one place, we intend to create a form of meta-textbook. Articles on psychological knowledge within the Psychology Wiki can be extensively cross linked to one another, easily explaining terminology from one sub-discipline to a researcher in another.

The articles themselves will be backed up by reference indexes of all relevant research papers, abstracts of which will be available on site. We also seek to have external links to fulltext of papers whenever possible, or to the appropriate journal subscription where it is not. In this way, we intend to create a discussion forum for each and every psychology paper that has ever been published.

We envisage that such an online resource, acting as a form of meta-textbook and containing the entirety of psychology knowledge, will enable individual collaborators to begin to integrate the vast and disparate knowledge. An internet community based user/contributor model, akin to that of Wikipedia, may allow psychologists to succeed in integrating our discipline where others in the past have failed.

In order to do this we need your help. The task of unifying our discipline into an integrated and modern science is simply too vast for any small group of individuals. Even the largest psychology department in the most elite and well funded institution could not do so. Only through the combined work of the entire psychology community will this task be possible.

I urge you to contribute to this project in any way you can.

Dr Joe Kiff July 2006