E-mail sent to heads of all psychology departments in the UK 9/3/06

((Psychology}}

Dear Colleague

I am e-mailing the heads of all the psychology departments in the UK to give you the opportunity to become aquainted with a new kind of academic website, one that can be edited by us all and which opens up enormous potential to improve our discipline's knowledge management.

Using the software behind WikiPedia, we have been given permission to build the Psychology Wiki for the knowledge domain of psychology. You can find it here:

http://psychology.wikicities.com/wiki/Main_Page

>From the front page you will find links to help and orientation sections, to get you started and to the Community portal which shows some of the highlights.

We have already amassed over 5000 pages and are working on almost 3500 articles.

With the joint collaboration of scholars, practitioners and users around the world we hope to build an academic resource in which all areas of psychology research and practice are reviewed and covered to a high academic standard. The goal is to document all the significant references in psychology and to link them either to full text or summaries on the academic databases.

In this way we hope to develop a indispensible free hypertext textbook that can be the basis of teaching in the profession. In addition lecture notes and education support materials can be archived and shared.

The organisation of the site means that once people edit, under an account, all their contributions can be credited to them.

We will be launching the site to the worldwide academic community in July, but it would be helpful, in ironing out some of the initial teething problems, if some more UK academics could come and help organise the research areas.

Please pass this notification on to other staff and students who might be interested.

Generally I recommend that people set aside half an hour to explore the site and to follow the simple instructions for contributing. By then the potential should be clear.

Thank you for your time.. Please help make this project a success.

Yours sincerely

Dr Joe Kiff Consultant Clinical Psychologist BPS No 31068