User:Jack Child
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I have a confession for my Wikipedia colleagues: I am an academic. I hope you won't hold it against me, and I hope we can work together on some of our common interests.
One of them is postage stamps, specifically those of Latin America, South American Antarctica, and the islands of the far South Atlantic (Falklands/Malvinas, South Georgia, South Sandwich). I use these stamps extensively in my academic publications, lectures, and Power Point presentations my students and I make. I am trying to nail down copyright issues concerning the use of postage stamp images on both the main Wikipedia page (in English) and the Commons. See the Wikipedia Commons page: "Commons talk:Stamps/Public domain".
Another project is to try and raise the use and respect for Wikipedia within the academic world I inhabit. It is no secret that many academics, especially at the university level, view Wikipedia as a not very legitimate source of knowledge. Many discourage (and even prohibit) use of Wikipedia in connection with term papers and projects, and will not accept a paper that cites Wikipedia sources. I strongly disagree with this approach, and in fact encourage my students to use Wikipedia, and develop an understanding of how it works. I also list my Wikipedia contributions in my annual reports for merit (and pay increases), much to the amusement of some of my colleagues. I think I am making some headway, and will keep trying to raise their appreciation of what Wikipedia can do for them and their students.
What follows is the abbreviated version of my "official" academic curriculum vitae (résumé), to which I append a representative list of some of my publications including several in which have used postage stamps as illustrations.