Some serious deliberation on identity and boundaries is also necessary. WikiSym in recent years has been criticized (fairly in my eyes as an author an PC member) as having significantly shifted from wiki-development and professional implementation to academic (English) Wikipedia studies. Is this just about Wikipedia, or MediaWiki, or any wiki? Will studies using non-wiki open collaboration and peer-production systems like crowdsourcing, citizen science, remixing, FLOSS development, etc. be allowed? There's a thousand slippery slopes absent a clear identity, mission, and goal.

And to crucially re-iterate again, what is the competitive advantage of having a journal of wiki-studies when every field from legal studies to complex systems is clamoring to incorporate wiki research to serve their agendas shifting towards "social", "participatory", "open", "big" approaches? I remain convinced that organizing wiki-scholars to edit special issues, perhaps even incorporating wiki-like processes into the review processes themselves to the extent editorial boards are open to it, will be far more fruitful use of scarce academic time and interest.

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 5:34 PM, Brian Keegan <bkeegan@northwestern.edu> wrote:
I keep coming back to this same question Aaron's raised as well. Wiki is obviously the glue holding everything thematically as well as logistically together in the proposals I've seen here-to-for, but it seems nigh-impossible to assemble an editorial board that is simultaneously open and qualified to reviewing submissions that almost certainly cover the gamut from journalism and media studies, computer and information sciences, complex and network sciences, sociology and organizational behavior, business and economics, legal and policy studies, education and outreach. Any single issue risks incoherence including articles across all these fields and the possibility of having rotating special issues dedicated to any single domain for this Wiki-journal to ensure some coherence would seem to suggest simply organizing a special issue in pre-existing journals.

It comes down to this: someone needs to clearly articulate why active wiki-researchers like myself should take the risk of publishing our research in a new journal when we potentially have higher-impact journals and better-tailored special issues as alternative and ready outlets.


On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 5:19 PM, Aaron Halfaker <aaron.halfaker@gmail.com> wrote:
So, if I can re-ignite and re-frame the original question I posed, 

  • Why do we need a "wiki journal" if there are already high impact journals that are receptive to high quality "wiki studies"? 

-Aaron


On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 4:11 PM, Manuel Palomo Duarte <manuel.palomo@uca.es> wrote:
Nice post, Kerry. Let me add that the citation rates are calculated using the cites in reputated journals already indexed ...


2012/11/8 Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond@gmail.com>

Actually the reputation of journals is usually derived from its impact factor

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor

 

which is all about citation rates rather than acceptance/rejection rates.

 

Acceptance rates are sometimes used for newer journals as citation rates aren’t available. But it doesn’t follow that a new journal must reject reasonable papers in order to achieve some desired acceptance rate. A new journal (properly advertised) will probably attract a lot of papers that have been rejected elsewhere so you probably end up with plenty of worthy-of-rejection material.

 

There is no way to get an immediate “great reputation” for a new journal. But I think a clear focus on topic, a hard-working international editorial team, and a firm but fair reviewing process and reviewers will yield good-quality papers and will attract more good quality papers in response

 

Kerry

 

 

From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Aaron Halfaker
Sent: Friday, 9 November 2012 1:51 AM
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wiki Research Journal? - Why?

 

"Highly rated" is an interesting property.  One of the ways that a publication venue becomes highly rated is by being highly restrictive.  In fact, the primary measurement of the quality of a publication venue is the acceptance rate of that conference.  

 

WikiSym is not considered highly rated because a high proportion of the submitted papers are accepted.  Would a wiki journal be more restrictive in order to gain a "highly rated" status?  

 

I think it's interesting to ask why WikiSym needs improvement and why attendance has been falling.  If a WikiSym is a wiki conference that is struggling to maintain participation, how might a wiki journal surmount such trouble?  Assuming that the answer to my question above is "yes, the wiki-journal would be more restrictive", how would such a journal gather more submissions than an established conference like WikiSym -- enough to both produce regular issues and maintain a high rejection rate?

 

-Aaron

 

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 9:12 AM, Joe Corneli <holtzermann17@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 3:02 PM, Aaron Halfaker <aaron.halfaker@gmail.com> wrote:

> To state it plainly, why do we need yet another publication venue specific to wiki software?

I think people want a "highly rated" publication venue.  Also,

«The reason why WikiSym is changing is for the same reason.  People are
not going to the conference!  I think the attendance has been below
100 for some time now.  That's not a sustainable number for the amount
of work that goes into organizing a conference.»

But what you're saying suggests that maybe work should be done to
improve existing venues rather than creating a new one.

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