I wish academic papers were more like Wikipedia articles. Currently what I'm working on is really "Building on" one pretty pivotal paper from the 90s, and there's a whole constellation of work that has spawned.

So much ink is spilled re-defining the problem, and reading any paper requires going through the system model every time because tons of arbitrary decisions may have been done different. It makes it hard to compare results, and makes almost every statement that reads "Over in this area we're not innovating on, we used the SOTA" wrong, because some other group is innovating in that corner.

If instead there was one canonical version of it with an edit history, and I could go try to just re-write one little para and argue in the talk section about it with the one-or-two other groups picking away at that, I feel like things could move faster and be done higher quality.

It'd also be a lot easier to peek at other areas. Currently if I have a question like "What's the latest in NeRFs underwater? I remember seeing a paper about that a while ago" I've basically got no idea.

> I wish academic papers were more like Wikipedia articles.

I don't think that would be helpful. Scientific development happens in branches, not linearly. The fact that a field is going in one direction does not mean that somebody won't make a breakthrough next year based on a poorly-cited paper from the 1970s, leapfrogging a whole bunch of studies that happened in the meantime.

Most of the time, there is simply no "state of the art" that covers a whole field, and even in limited sub-fields, quite often there is no consensus.