Emijrp writes:

About the business model, perhaps the journal can't survive by donations but by entities that receive donations. I'm talking about Wikimedia chapters. There are some powerfull chapters out there that may want to support this journal project providing human effort, resources and some money.

Certainly if the Wikimedia Foundation could support an online journal, this would be a great outcome. As the basis of funding for the chapters appears to be changing from the model of sharing the donations based on region donating the money to one of bidding for project funding, I am not sure that the chapters will have “free funds” any more but only funds committed to specific projects (which could include the journal, of course). But as the journal is not inherently tied to any specific country, it’s not clear to me which chapter(s) would/should be interested. I don’t know if there are other ways to bid for WMF funding other than via chapters?

But, either way, if WMF (or its chapters) is to support this journal, it would need to fit within the WMF strategic plan:

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Role_of_the_WMF

where I think this journal concept might fit under “Increase access to information to drive community and Foundation decision making and action”.

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Role_of_the_WMF#Increase_access_to_information_to_drive_community_and_Foundation_decision-making_and_action

and specifically to address the bullet point:

Foster a healthy community of researchers among community members and researchers interested in analyzing Wikimedia; provide access to relevant data and highlight important questions to be addressed

Note that to align with the WMF strategic plan might require the scope of the journal to be constrained to matters of relevance to WMF, e.g. based on Wikpedia or other WMF projects, using WMF data or trying to answer WMF questions or, at least, research relating to non-WMF things for which some WMF implication/conclusion can be derived (e.g. it worked here so it might also work for Wikipedia). As I mentioned previously, determining the topic/scope of a journal is not easy and I don’t know if everyone in this conversation would accept a “relevance to WMF” criteria.

Kerry