I equally see the journal as a way to bridge research as it is, and research as it's likely to become. The main work the editing committee is liable to do is social: enforce usual procedures, keep in touch with the ISI and other certification centers, find partnerships with scholar institutions, ensure communication toward scientific and general public. Is such a work inessential? I am not so sure. During the OA Week meeting at the UNESCO, we all came to agree on one point: the main (if not the sole) obstacle to the generalization of new scientific practices consists in current, unquestioned, hard to get rid off habits. Designing some kind of intermediary between pioneering initiatives and mainstream reflexes may have some relevancy, not in the long-term perspective, but now.
The journal may have therefore two valuable objectives:
*It practices an extended version of open access. The mere facts of publishing peer-reviewing debates and getting outsiders to take a small, albeit definite, part in the writing and reviewing process are already quite unusual novelties. If the journal becomes a success wide enough to encourage other journals in imitating it, I think the whole project would have been rewarding.
*It's a good way to recruit new scholars, especially for the wiki-laboratory. I know a lot of French academics who are interested in Wikis. Yet they mainly issue solitary analysis without taking part to wider wiki-research.
I'm agreeing with you on the refactoring factor. Wiki is a place where people act rather than say. It may not be the most convenient structure to host a journal, although Wikipedia has already imported some tools and behaviors from scientific journals: footnotes, FA/GA reviewing and so on. It is a powerful device to reveal social and textual interactions. As such, it seems to have all the requirements to experiment extended open access, by showing the elaboration of editorial decisions, peer-reviewing discussions, corrections, works in progress from a proposal to a complete article…