<p>My forecast is pessimistic.</p>

<p>The community of academic statisticians (aka ASA members) produces fantastic initiatives that would greatly enhance the discipline as a whole. Unfortunately, most of them are one-man uphill battles.</p>

<p>When Jim Pitman was the President of IMS, he <a href="http://stat-www.berkeley.edu/users/pitman/ims_pres_address.pdf" rel="nofollow">actively promoted</a> the idea of having more publications in open access. There were many good points in his presentations and articles on this (of which the most tangilbe outcomes is posting the Annals contents in arxiv.org). An obvious one is that it is cheaper for the end user -- why should one pay the commercial publisher for essentially zero added value? We submit a properly formatted, camera-ready paper (although I've had a number of examples of publishers who retyped my LaTeX into Word... it is difficult to desribe how furious I was fixing their typoes and furmatting errars); why paying somebody $1000/year to access five papers from this journal? Another idea had to do with incentives in evaluation of faculty: OK, we all understand that you need to publish in JASA and Annals to get tenured. But once you are there, why don't give more consideration to free online journals? Let the young faculty play in these high impact journals. People know who Peter Hall or David Dunson is if they've opened more than three issues of JASA or Annals over the last five years, and you don't need to continue proving yourself anymore to get promoted any further. Make your work accessible to non-academic researchers and the third world. Wonderful ideas; how much of that has changed over the past five years? None.</p>

<p>David Banks visited what then was my department of statistics, and gave a talk that analyzed whether <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470315262.ch5/summary" rel="nofollow">Wikipedia is complete</a>, in the sense of having every topic covered. In the end of the presentation, he urged the members of the audience to contribute to wikipedia and help improving it. Wonderful ideas; how many statisticians have contributed to Wikipedia over the past five years? A handful, I guess; and we probably have all of them on this site of benevolent statisticians, as chl put it. (I do list my contributions in my curriculum vitae, just in case I were to run across another benevolent statistician at the evaluating end.)</p>

<p>Finally, just looking at our website, of the big names in statistics (defined as people who would get an immediate recognition from about half of the attendees at the JSM... or whatever the analogue is in Europe -- sorry, my view is totally obstructed by the US borders), we have Michael Chernick and Frank Harrell, who does not seem to be very active recently. That's a very low hit rate -- I guess I could put another hundred or so names into this hat of the authors of the important books and papers who would fit the above definition.</p>

<p>Of the existing statistics cultures, only consulting (represented wonderfully by whuber) may have any incentives to contribute actively to CV. Academic statisticians need to publish their papers in as highly ranked journals as possible, and CV does not have an impact factor. Industry statisticians need to report their hours, and CV is not a paying client. Consultants may seek to extend their business, so CV may indeed be an engine. Once the criteria for promotion IN ALL DEPARTMENTS would include maintaing a 1000 rep/year on CV and maintaining at least three wikipedia pages in your expertise area, making at least one edit a year in each of them, the situation will change, and we'll all be crowded out by people who are better statisticians than StasK is. (I've heard of people who made contributing to CV a requirement for their consulting classes, though.)</p>

<p>Here's a little bit of the silver lining. The faculty search committees would benefit from CV in the parts of evaluating the communication abilities of their candidates: if a person can explain things well on CV to statistically un- (or under-) prepared audience, chances are they will succeed in the classroom or in the consulting function, too. This is the only realistic selling point I see as a way of explaining how CV can be useful to the statistical community, the way it exists and functions right now. If young faculty were to work on CV and to bring this kind of culture into their classes, we might see the paradigm shift in the nexts twenty or so years.</p>
