The following idea is based on a suggestion someone just came out with. A number of users were discussing BLPs and the point that verification of written sources and journals was not that easy in many cases.
Many colleges or libraries use a subscription and their members or even members of the public can then read those references. I'm not an expert, but the following idea came to mind as worthwhile asking for thoughts on, if it has any merit.
Suppose the Foundation subscribed to various key databases. A proxy (however one does it), gets set up that people can log in to, and then read those journals or databases. The Foundation sets a fee scale for access, in whatever way works, and any person who wants to subscribe, can do so. In some cases, subscription might be free. Anonymity, including anonymity of any payment, is easy (see below)
* General and society benefits -- spread of knowledge; user and third party enjoyment at having access to information they might otherwise not have; less widely used subscription-only databases may be made more accessible
* Wikipedia quality benefits -- users can purchase easy access to reliable sources that otherwise they may not conveniently have; users can verify citations and references that they might otherwise not be able to; articles will more regularly become exposed to updated research (if the idea takes off).
* Other project benefits and possible features -- Financial (steady income stream from subscriptions); small trial ability; great scaleability if successful; inherently fairly safe in an income/expenditure sense.
Payment can readily be made anonymous (the means to pay via anything from credit card to paypal to "internet gold" already exists) so that pseudonymous users can participate equally, a login account is issued with payment so no identification to WMF is needed, and given a login the login can be used from home, school, mobile, or work.
One novel example of pricing differentiality might include, a lower rate (or free) for users who routinely add cited high quality content to the project, or who use/have used the sources directly to benefit articles. Perhaps a cheaper rate for users with at least one FA or two GAs, or a subjective decision for the year, for users who can show good cause in their contributions. Some ideas, but the principle is interesting.
If there are practical issues, so be it, but I don't see an obvious problem, and it might be worth passing round for thoughts.
FT2
This would be a wonderful, wonderful thing. We're at the point in a lot of articles now where access to scientific and historical peer-reviewed journals is an absolute prerequisite to intelligently improving articles. Most of us are affiliated with institutions that have access to these sites, but many aren't, and I'm sure that impedes our growth to some extent.
I suspect, like insurance, the database people wouldn't play ball if we allowed an opt-in strategy, but what about buying institutional access for the community of admins + non-admins with rollback or some other bit. Or, the community of people who have a FA or something.
I have no idea what the foundation's budget looks like, but if it has some money to invest, depending on the price tag, it could be a wonderful use of funds.
Alec
On 12/20/08, FT2 ft2.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
The following idea is based on a suggestion someone just came out with. A number of users were discussing BLPs and the point that verification of written sources and journals was not that easy in many cases.
Many colleges or libraries use a subscription and their members or even members of the public can then read those references. I'm not an expert, but the following idea came to mind as worthwhile asking for thoughts on, if it has any merit.
Suppose the Foundation subscribed to various key databases. A proxy (however one does it), gets set up that people can log in to, and then read those journals or databases. The Foundation sets a fee scale for access, in whatever way works, and any person who wants to subscribe, can do so. In some cases, subscription might be free. Anonymity, including anonymity of any payment, is easy (see below)
- General and society benefits -- spread of knowledge; user and third party
enjoyment at having access to information they might otherwise not have; less widely used subscription-only databases may be made more accessible
- Wikipedia quality benefits -- users can purchase easy access to reliable
sources that otherwise they may not conveniently have; users can verify citations and references that they might otherwise not be able to; articles will more regularly become exposed to updated research (if the idea takes off).
- Other project benefits and possible features -- Financial (steady income
stream from subscriptions); small trial ability; great scaleability if successful; inherently fairly safe in an income/expenditure sense.
Payment can readily be made anonymous (the means to pay via anything from credit card to paypal to "internet gold" already exists) so that pseudonymous users can participate equally, a login account is issued with payment so no identification to WMF is needed, and given a login the login can be used from home, school, mobile, or work.
One novel example of pricing differentiality might include, a lower rate (or free) for users who routinely add cited high quality content to the project, or who use/have used the sources directly to benefit articles. Perhaps a cheaper rate for users with at least one FA or two GAs, or a subjective decision for the year, for users who can show good cause in their contributions. Some ideas, but the principle is interesting.
If there are practical issues, so be it, but I don't see an obvious problem, and it might be worth passing round for thoughts.
FT2 _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 12:28 AM, Alec Conroy alecmconroy@gmail.com wrote:
This would be a wonderful, wonderful thing. We're at the point in a lot of articles now where access to scientific and historical peer-reviewed journals is an absolute prerequisite to intelligently improving articles. Most of us are affiliated with institutions that have access to these sites, but many aren't, and I'm sure that impedes our growth to some extent.
I suspect, like insurance, the database people wouldn't play ball if we allowed an opt-in strategy, but what about buying institutional access for the community of admins + non-admins with rollback or some other bit. Or, the community of people who have a FA or something.
Yes, I think that should work. I mean, when the University Library of X buys such a subscription, they also buy a licence for a more or less defined set of users, viz. "All our students" or even just "everyone who has a university network access".
So we should be fine there.
2008/12/20 Alec Conroy alecmconroy@gmail.com:
I suspect, like insurance, the database people wouldn't play ball if we allowed an opt-in strategy, but what about buying institutional access for the community of admins + non-admins with rollback or some other bit. Or, the community of people who have a FA or something.
Yeah. Individual opt-in isn't a good idea for the database providers; they sell access for a reasonable sum per capita as a block grant, but (somewhat opportunistically) will offer an individual subscription rate at ten or a hundred times that.
For example, a university can subscribe to the online Oxford English Dictionary for ~$0.25 per full-time student (with a minimum cost of ~$500/year); a single individual subscriber would be charged $300 for the same level of access. Numbers vary immensely and are not usually very easy to find publicly, so this may not reflect what people are actually paying - but it's in the right ballpark.
That's three orders of magnitude, there! Anything that let us opt in individuals for a nominal fee would pretty much be able to kill their individual sales service stone dead...
It's certainly something that has promise, but it'd call for a clear definition of quite what we're trying to achieve and a lot of very careful negotiation with the suppliers by someone at WMF. The major advantage, I suppose, is that having some kind of an access deal with us is something they get to write nice press releases about :-)
A productive first step would be to have someone at WMF (any idea who to suggest this to?) make inquiries with JSTOR and sound them out on the issue; they are pretty good at working with users with weird requirements, are themselves a fluffy hippy nonprofit body, and are probably the people most likely to try to work with us.
(They also have one of the most useful resources we could look for, so win-win!)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512
On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 5:56 PM, FT2 wrote:
The following idea is based on a suggestion someone just came out with. A number of users were discussing BLPs and the point that verification of written sources and journals was not that easy in many cases.
Many colleges or libraries use a subscription and their members or even members of the public can then read those references. I'm not an expert, but the following idea came to mind as worthwhile asking for thoughts on, if it has any merit.
Suppose the Foundation subscribed to various key databases. A proxy (however one does it), gets set up that people can log in to, and then read those journals or databases. The Foundation sets a fee scale for access, in whatever way works, and any person who wants to subscribe, can do so. In some cases, subscription might be free. Anonymity, including anonymity of any payment, is easy (see below)
- General and society benefits -- spread of knowledge; user and third party
enjoyment at having access to information they might otherwise not have; less widely used subscription-only databases may be made more accessible
- Wikipedia quality benefits -- users can purchase easy access to reliable
sources that otherwise they may not conveniently have; users can verify citations and references that they might otherwise not be able to; articles will more regularly become exposed to updated research (if the idea takes off).
- Other project benefits and possible features -- Financial (steady income
stream from subscriptions); small trial ability; great scaleability if successful; inherently fairly safe in an income/expenditure sense.
Payment can readily be made anonymous (the means to pay via anything from credit card to paypal to "internet gold" already exists) so that pseudonymous users can participate equally, a login account is issued with payment so no identification to WMF is needed, and given a login the login can be used from home, school, mobile, or work.
One novel example of pricing differentiality might include, a lower rate (or free) for users who routinely add cited high quality content to the project, or who use/have used the sources directly to benefit articles. Perhaps a cheaper rate for users with at least one FA or two GAs, or a subjective decision for the year, for users who can show good cause in their contributions. Some ideas, but the principle is interesting.
If there are practical issues, so be it, but I don't see an obvious problem, and it might be worth passing round for thoughts.
FT2
Another service the Foundation could subscribe to: the Internet Archive's on-demand-archiving service https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Internet_archive#Archive-It . We lose many links to linkrot, and those links are often references and in ever more instances, are unique. Many of them are already covered in the publicly accessible portions of IA, but even when they are, it is very rare for an editor to check.
And the benefits of this service are very clear. Given that we're supposed to be friendly and have links with IA, perhaps WMF wouldn't even have to pay for it.
- -- gwern
I doubt that most conventional publishers will permit the Foundation to re-sell their articles at anything less than their own list price, which is often as high as $40 per article. (that's what this amounts to) -- or for a flat rate to provide access to anyone who gets a Wikipedia account.
On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 6:51 PM, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512
On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 5:56 PM, FT2 wrote:
The following idea is based on a suggestion someone just came out with. A number of users were discussing BLPs and the point that verification of written sources and journals was not that easy in many cases.
Many colleges or libraries use a subscription and their members or even members of the public can then read those references. I'm not an expert, but the following idea came to mind as worthwhile asking for thoughts on, if it has any merit.
Suppose the Foundation subscribed to various key databases. A proxy (however one does it), gets set up that people can log in to, and then read those journals or databases. The Foundation sets a fee scale for access, in whatever way works, and any person who wants to subscribe, can do so. In some cases, subscription might be free. Anonymity, including anonymity of any payment, is easy (see below)
- General and society benefits -- spread of knowledge; user and third party
enjoyment at having access to information they might otherwise not have; less widely used subscription-only databases may be made more accessible
- Wikipedia quality benefits -- users can purchase easy access to reliable
sources that otherwise they may not conveniently have; users can verify citations and references that they might otherwise not be able to; articles will more regularly become exposed to updated research (if the idea takes off).
- Other project benefits and possible features -- Financial (steady income
stream from subscriptions); small trial ability; great scaleability if successful; inherently fairly safe in an income/expenditure sense.
Payment can readily be made anonymous (the means to pay via anything from credit card to paypal to "internet gold" already exists) so that pseudonymous users can participate equally, a login account is issued with payment so no identification to WMF is needed, and given a login the login can be used from home, school, mobile, or work.
One novel example of pricing differentiality might include, a lower rate (or free) for users who routinely add cited high quality content to the project, or who use/have used the sources directly to benefit articles. Perhaps a cheaper rate for users with at least one FA or two GAs, or a subjective decision for the year, for users who can show good cause in their contributions. Some ideas, but the principle is interesting.
If there are practical issues, so be it, but I don't see an obvious problem, and it might be worth passing round for thoughts.
FT2
Another service the Foundation could subscribe to: the Internet Archive's on-demand-archiving service https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Internet_archive#Archive-It . We lose many links to linkrot, and those links are often references and in ever more instances, are unique. Many of them are already covered in the publicly accessible portions of IA, but even when they are, it is very rare for an editor to check.
And the benefits of this service are very clear. Given that we're supposed to be friendly and have links with IA, perhaps WMF wouldn't even have to pay for it.
gwern -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
iEYEAREKAAYFAklNhQoACgkQvpDo5Pfl1oKqdgCfescrNXY3PQFtsOqpom4HAv1r fT8An3qwLU4pP2e3uv1PUjXPJHU0P5rF =qgPY -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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On 12/20/08, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
I doubt that most conventional publishers will permit the Foundation to re-sell their articles at anything less than their own list price, which is often as high as $40 per article. (that's what this amounts to) -- or for a flat rate to provide access to anyone who gets a Wikipedia account.
Access to anyone with a wikipedia account would never fly-- that's essentially asking them to offer it to anyone with internet access.
But getting access to our admins, our users who have acheived a certain edit count, or have some other well-defined criteria wouldn't be much different from a university library giving access to all enrolled students.
Also a plus-- Wikipedia's content editors are, I think, by a large, usually in academia. Our editors tend to be disproportionately college-aged or college-affiliated. That means that many or most of the people we would be buying the service for already have it, and so would represent pure profit to JSTOR (or whomever).
Alec
I did some preliminary inquires a year ago, with not very enthusiastic publisher response, but could follow up now--I think we're much more visible.
Based on request I get to help out, and on observed editing and some user pages, I don't think it's remotely true, even in many science fields, that most of our editors have access to university libraries. Nor do I think that most of our content editors are administrators; conversely, of the 1100 active admins, perhaps half are active editors. Perhaps we should think on the basis of active editors over say 500 mainspace edits. This should significantly reassure the publishers. How many people is that?
In my experience as an ejournal negotiator, starting from the first days of ejournals. publishers are not very willing to reduce significantly below published rate schedules, and we might do better asking for it as a donation. . But both could be tried. Most publishers have flat rates, in science averaging $1000 per journal, much less in the humanities. -- but there are a great many titles. some go by size--& for this we're unique in terms of subscriber base & its hard to predict what they'd estimate.
Let's take JSTOR--remember, its backfiles only, typically without the most recent 5 yrs. If one wants the most recent 5 yrs, one goes to the publisher & pays by title. Very very roughly, rates for the JStor portion can be $500/yr for a small public library to $50,000 for a university, depending of where they class the institution & how many titles. If the foundation would like me to approach them, someone should email me offline.
In science, I think some of the scientific societies will donate & the way to go is for some member to inquire Remember that all US NIH & UK MRC papers will be available free from 08+ after a 6 month delay through pubmedcentral.
There are of course great many other possibilities, but all the relatively inexpensive ones involve backfiles only.
At the going rates, figure about $1000 per journal in science--less in other subjects for academic journals. I doubt we'll get discounts, and I think we'll do better to ask for it as a donation. I've made preliminary inquiries in the past, and not gotten very far. But maybe it is time to try gain.
The publisher I think this would really make sense for in terms of things like BLP is the NYTimes blocked years, but essentially all public libraries should have them.
As for JSTOR, this is perhaps a possibility as a special case. I can make the contact. T
On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 7:35 PM, Alec Conroy alecmconroy@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/20/08, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
I doubt that most conventional publishers will permit the Foundation to re-sell their articles at anything less than their own list price, which is often as high as $40 per article. (that's what this amounts to) -- or for a flat rate to provide access to anyone who gets a Wikipedia account.
Access to anyone with a wikipedia account would never fly-- that's essentially asking them to offer it to anyone with internet access.
But getting access to our admins, our users who have acheived a certain edit count, or have some other well-defined criteria wouldn't be much different from a university library giving access to all enrolled students.
Also a plus-- Wikipedia's content editors are, I think, by a large, usually in academia. Our editors tend to be disproportionately college-aged or college-affiliated. That means that many or most of the people we would be buying the service for already have it, and so would represent pure profit to JSTOR (or whomever).
Alec
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Start with one and then see how that goes. It can be fine tuned, then used as a case study for further sources who may otherwise have concerns.
We have two ways to make it "not just anyone", both are equally malleable. The first is, set criteria based on edits, "level of trust", or FA/GA contributions. The other is we ask for a rate for "up to 5000 editors of our choice", which is probably similar size to a number of institutions or universities, and we then can fine tune internally how those are allocated. The latter would mean that we have a lot of flexibility - we can avoid giving access to some editors who meet the criteria but don't much need it, and give access to those who can make a good case for it.
One option might be even, request access for up to 1000 users, and indicate a list of "criteria + fee/donation requested" (including "these are the kinds of editors who will get priority"). First 1000 applications get access. If the demand is there, we can request access for a further 1000 users and repeat.
Bear in mind we are not after permission to republish them. We just want access for selected users to read and verify the information, or publish a generalized summary. This would not compete, any more than a journal citation in a bibliography or academic paper would "compete".
FT2
On 12/21/08, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
I did some preliminary inquires a year ago, with not very enthusiastic publisher response, but could follow up now--I think we're much more visible.
Based on request I get to help out, and on observed editing and some user pages, I don't think it's remotely true, even in many science fields, that most of our editors have access to university libraries. Nor do I think that most of our content editors are administrators; conversely, of the 1100 active admins, perhaps half are active editors. Perhaps we should think on the basis of active editors over say 500 mainspace edits. This should significantly reassure the publishers. How many people is that?
In my experience as an ejournal negotiator, starting from the first days of ejournals. publishers are not very willing to reduce significantly below published rate schedules, and we might do better asking for it as a donation. . But both could be tried. Most publishers have flat rates, in science averaging $1000 per journal, much less in the humanities. -- but there are a great many titles. some go by size--& for this we're unique in terms of subscriber base & its hard to predict what they'd estimate.
Let's take JSTOR--remember, its backfiles only, typically without the most recent 5 yrs. If one wants the most recent 5 yrs, one goes to the publisher & pays by title. Very very roughly, rates for the JStor portion can be $500/yr for a small public library to $50,000 for a university, depending of where they class the institution & how many titles. If the foundation would like me to approach them, someone should email me offline.
In science, I think some of the scientific societies will donate & the way to go is for some member to inquire Remember that all US NIH & UK MRC papers will be available free from 08+ after a 6 month delay through pubmedcentral.
There are of course great many other possibilities, but all the relatively inexpensive ones involve backfiles only.
At the going rates, figure about $1000 per journal in science--less in other subjects for academic journals. I doubt we'll get discounts, and I think we'll do better to ask for it as a donation. I've made preliminary inquiries in the past, and not gotten very far. But maybe it is time to try gain.
The publisher I think this would really make sense for in terms of things like BLP is the NYTimes blocked years, but essentially all public libraries should have them.
As for JSTOR, this is perhaps a possibility as a special case. I can make the contact. T
On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 7:35 PM, Alec Conroy alecmconroy@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/20/08, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
I doubt that most conventional publishers will permit the Foundation to re-sell their articles at anything less than their own list price, which is often as high as $40 per article. (that's what this amounts to) -- or for a flat rate to provide access to anyone who gets a Wikipedia account.
Access to anyone with a wikipedia account would never fly-- that's essentially asking them to offer it to anyone with internet access.
But getting access to our admins, our users who have acheived a certain edit count, or have some other well-defined criteria wouldn't be much different from a university library giving access to all enrolled students.
Also a plus-- Wikipedia's content editors are, I think, by a large, usually in academia. Our editors tend to be disproportionately college-aged or college-affiliated. That means that many or most of the people we would be buying the service for already have it, and so would represent pure profit to JSTOR (or whomever).
Alec
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-- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
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Actually, this is a brilliant idea, and one of the best ideas for Foundation funding use I can think of. The exact logistics can be worked out later (and I think we'd have to have some firmer numbers from the publishers in terms of pricing before we could figure out exactly how it would need to be done), but I certainly had an easier time writing articles when I had access to university research tools, and can't be the only one.
I personally would even be willing to donate to cover WMF's costs against my access in this regard, provided they can negotiate reasonable block purchase pricing. Individual subscriptions are unfortunately rather priced out of the market.
On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 8:41 PM, FT2 ft2.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
Start with one and then see how that goes. It can be fine tuned, then used as a case study for further sources who may otherwise have concerns.
We have two ways to make it "not just anyone", both are equally malleable. The first is, set criteria based on edits, "level of trust", or FA/GA contributions. The other is we ask for a rate for "up to 5000 editors of our choice", which is probably similar size to a number of institutions or universities, and we then can fine tune internally how those are allocated. The latter would mean that we have a lot of flexibility - we can avoid giving access to some editors who meet the criteria but don't much need it, and give access to those who can make a good case for it.
One option might be even, request access for up to 1000 users, and indicate a list of "criteria + fee/donation requested" (including "these are the kinds of editors who will get priority"). First 1000 applications get access. If the demand is there, we can request access for a further 1000 users and repeat.
Bear in mind we are not after permission to republish them. We just want access for selected users to read and verify the information, or publish a generalized summary. This would not compete, any more than a journal citation in a bibliography or academic paper would "compete".
FT2
On 12/21/08, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
I did some preliminary inquires a year ago, with not very enthusiastic publisher response, but could follow up now--I think we're much more visible.
Based on request I get to help out, and on observed editing and some user pages, I don't think it's remotely true, even in many science fields, that most of our editors have access to university libraries. Nor do I think that most of our content editors are administrators; conversely, of the 1100 active admins, perhaps half are active editors. Perhaps we should think on the basis of active editors over say 500 mainspace edits. This should significantly reassure the publishers. How many people is that?
In my experience as an ejournal negotiator, starting from the first days of ejournals. publishers are not very willing to reduce significantly below published rate schedules, and we might do better asking for it as a donation. . But both could be tried. Most publishers have flat rates, in science averaging $1000 per journal, much less in the humanities. -- but there are a great many titles. some go by size--& for this we're unique in terms of subscriber base & its hard to predict what they'd estimate.
Let's take JSTOR--remember, its backfiles only, typically without the most recent 5 yrs. If one wants the most recent 5 yrs, one goes to the publisher & pays by title. Very very roughly, rates for the JStor portion can be $500/yr for a small public library to $50,000 for a university, depending of where they class the institution & how many titles. If the foundation would like me to approach them, someone should email me offline.
In science, I think some of the scientific societies will donate & the way to go is for some member to inquire Remember that all US NIH & UK MRC papers will be available free from 08+ after a 6 month delay through pubmedcentral.
There are of course great many other possibilities, but all the relatively inexpensive ones involve backfiles only.
At the going rates, figure about $1000 per journal in science--less in other subjects for academic journals. I doubt we'll get discounts, and I think we'll do better to ask for it as a donation. I've made preliminary inquiries in the past, and not gotten very far. But maybe it is time to try gain.
The publisher I think this would really make sense for in terms of things like BLP is the NYTimes blocked years, but essentially all public libraries should have them.
As for JSTOR, this is perhaps a possibility as a special case. I can make the contact. T
On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 7:35 PM, Alec Conroy alecmconroy@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/20/08, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
I doubt that most conventional publishers will permit the Foundation to re-sell their articles at anything less than their own list price, which is often as high as $40 per article. (that's what this amounts to) -- or for a flat rate to provide access to anyone who gets a Wikipedia account.
Access to anyone with a wikipedia account would never fly-- that's essentially asking them to offer it to anyone with internet access.
But getting access to our admins, our users who have acheived a certain edit count, or have some other well-defined criteria wouldn't be much different from a university library giving access to all enrolled students.
Also a plus-- Wikipedia's content editors are, I think, by a large, usually in academia. Our editors tend to be disproportionately college-aged or college-affiliated. That means that many or most of the people we would be buying the service for already have it, and so would represent pure profit to JSTOR (or whomever).
Alec
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-- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
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On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 5:56 PM, FT2 ft2.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
The following idea is based on a suggestion someone just came out with. A number of users were discussing BLPs and the point that verification of written sources and journals was not that easy in many cases.
http://markmail.org/message/57azrykd6dvp67rw#query:%22A lot of people don't have access to things like Pubmed and LexisNexis and"+page:1+mid:hbbzieislunrk45t+state:results
We need to get someone who's more of a professional librarian to look at this and comment. What are typical university library online reference access budgets like, for example?
Phoebe?
I comment as a professional academic librarian. I was the cochair of princeton's collection development committee on electronic resources from the day it started.
The typical budget today for e-resources for a major university is on the order of three to six million dollars a year, mainly for science journals and databases. The most expensive subscriptions to the works of a single publisher can be over one million dollars, and there are individual databases in the fifty to one hundred-thousand dollar range. A typical budget for a good undergraduate college might be one million; it will not have the most expensive journals.
On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 12:11 AM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
We need to get someone who's more of a professional librarian to look at this and comment. What are typical university library online reference access budgets like, for example?
Phoebe?
-- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
I think here, the most good we could probably do is in getting access to journals that your average public library won't offer. I do get access to some research resources through the regular public libraries here, and that's pretty standard. Maybe we should survey what those offer, to get a better idea where the major gaps might be?
On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 9:41 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
I comment as a professional academic librarian. I was the cochair of princeton's collection development committee on electronic resources from the day it started.
The typical budget today for e-resources for a major university is on the order of three to six million dollars a year, mainly for science journals and databases. The most expensive subscriptions to the works of a single publisher can be over one million dollars, and there are individual databases in the fifty to one hundred-thousand dollar range. A typical budget for a good undergraduate college might be one million; it will not have the most expensive journals.
On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 12:11 AM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
We need to get someone who's more of a professional librarian to look at this and comment. What are typical university library online reference access budgets like, for example?
Phoebe?
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On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 8:41 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
I comment as a professional academic librarian. I was the cochair of princeton's collection development committee on electronic resources from the day it started.
The typical budget today for e-resources for a major university is on the order of three to six million dollars a year, mainly for science journals and databases. The most expensive subscriptions to the works of a single publisher can be over one million dollars, and there are individual databases in the fifty to one hundred-thousand dollar range. A typical budget for a good undergraduate college might be one million; it will not have the most expensive journals.
On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 12:11 AM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
We need to get someone who's more of a professional librarian to look at this and comment. What are typical university library online reference access budgets like, for example?
Phoebe?
Thank you, David.
Are those prices proprietary or sensitive, or would it be possible for you to release a list of what your libraries subscribe to, for discussion and analysis purposes?
I think the "can we afford $6 million a year" answer is a clear but not absolute no (with a compelling argument, it's in the range of charitable donations we could conceivably ask for).
But would for example $100,000, or $500,000, make a significantly useful amount to work with?
What could we get for that, and what would be missing?
On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 4:16 AM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.comwrote:
I think the "can we afford $6 million a year" answer is a clear but not absolute no (with a compelling argument, it's in the range of charitable donations we could conceivably ask for).
But would for example $100,000, or $500,000, make a significantly useful amount to work with?
What could we get for that, and what would be missing?
-- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com
... and how many users would we be able to have accessing the database for that kind of sum?
FT2
I hate to pop into this, but have we thought about the question of reader access. By this I mean as it currently is with most of our sources, our readers are able to verify the articles themselves if they wish to. If we start to use sources that only certain people can access, that closes off the ability of the average reader to verify what we write.
I don't know if this has been given thought or not, but it does need looking into as I think it affects the free nature of the project. (Eventually I can see cases where articles sources are not free, or easily gotten freely, which may impact how new users can contribute.)
-- Nixeagle
2008/12/23 Wilhelm Schnotz wilhelm@nixeagle.org:
I hate to pop into this, but have we thought about the question of reader access. By this I mean as it currently is with most of our sources, our readers are able to verify the articles themselves if they wish to. If we start to use sources that only certain people can access, that closes off the ability of the average reader to verify what we write.
We've discussed this before, in a general case, and pretty much dismissed it.
Limiting ourselves to easily-accessible sources sounds good in practice, but immediately runs into trouble. We simply can't write articles on most of our subjects to a good and reliable standard without relying heavily on access to print books (which people object to because they're offline) or subscription databases (which people object to because they're not accessible to casual users).
(This should be distinguished from, eg, people sourcing things to private archives; in the former case they're accessible by anyone who goes through the right channels, but in the latter they may be literally inaccessible to anyone else...)
Andrew Gray wrote:
2008/12/23 Wilhelm Schnotz wilhelm@nixeagle.org:
I hate to pop into this, but have we thought about the question of reader access. By this I mean as it currently is with most of our sources, our readers are able to verify the articles themselves if they wish to. If we start to use sources that only certain people can access, that closes off the ability of the average reader to verify what we write.
We've discussed this before, in a general case, and pretty much dismissed it.
Limiting ourselves to easily-accessible sources sounds good in practice, but immediately runs into trouble. We simply can't write articles on most of our subjects to a good and reliable standard without relying heavily on access to print books (which people object to because they're offline) or subscription databases (which people object to because they're not accessible to casual users).
(This should be distinguished from, eg, people sourcing things to private archives; in the former case they're accessible by anyone who goes through the right channels, but in the latter they may be literally inaccessible to anyone else...)
This brings to mind an interesting case...
About how to source an un-prejudiced article about the former Finnish president [[Urho Kaleva Kekkonen]]. A vastly controversial figure in Finnish politicians.
The problem of sourcing stands thus:
While there have been researchers of varying credibility writing about Kekkonen (some clearly conspiracy nuts, others with a clear wish to create a national mythos around his persona, with no problems about letting the mythopoiesis be transparent, and some serious seeming researchers), the big festering problem with "Kekkolology" has been the asymmetry of access to primary sources that researchers have had.
The researcher Juhani Suomi long held a near solitary access to Kekkonens private archives, as he was chosen by Kekkonens estate holders to create a "definitive" biography the statesman. This was vociferously criticized by the conspiracy nuts on the other hand, and at least on the surface serious people such as his successor Mauno Koivisto, who wanted in his own retirement years write a wider historiography of the era, in which both of them operated (him still as a Prime Minister in the critical years). The accusations were both about the inequality of access to the primary sources, but also about the fact that Suomi might have been a partisan for the cause of the agrarian centrist party Kekkonen and Suomi were both aligned with, thus creating a "official" party historiography of the man.
This inspires me to check out the talk page of that article, to study how wikipedias editors have solved that knotty problem.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
Hi,
This is an interesting idea indeed. However, I'm not sure it would fly, for two reasons:
1) I doubt many receivers (of journals, etc.) would be able to understand them well enough. Academic papers aren't always easy to understand, especially for a non-expert, and they could be, God forbid, _misunderstood_. 2) Service providers would, I think, be unwilling to catch on to this idea, given the low image of Wikipedia in many areas of academia.
Thoughts?
—Thomas Larsen
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On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 9:54 PM, Thomas Larsen wrote:
Hi,
This is an interesting idea indeed. However, I'm not sure it would fly, for two reasons:
- I doubt many receivers (of journals, etc.) would be able to
understand them well enough. Academic papers aren't always easy to understand, especially for a non-expert, and they could be, God forbid, _misunderstood_. 2) Service providers would, I think, be unwilling to catch on to this idea, given the low image of Wikipedia in many areas of academia.
Thoughts?
—Thomas Larsen
1) My personal experience would disagree. I am far from expert on Japanese poetry - I know not a lick of Japanese, and at best I have a good background understanding - yet I was able to quite profitably employ a number of papers I found in JSTOR in articles like [[Shotetsu]] or [[Fujiwara no Teika]]. Academic papers in technical subjects certainly can be difficult, and I've read any number of math or computer science papers which are utterly useless to laymen. But let's beware generalizing that to all papers. 2) That could be an argument for this proposal. 'Perhaps we haven't been as rigorous and high-quality as you'd like - but we're willing to improve, if you'll help us.'
- -- gwern
On 12/21/08, Thomas Larsen larsen.thomas.h@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
This is an interesting idea indeed. However, I'm not sure it would fly, for two reasons:
- I doubt many receivers (of journals, etc.) would be able to
understand them well enough. Academic papers aren't always easy to understand, especially for a non-expert, and they could be, God forbid, _misunderstood_.
My experience is 100% to the contrary. By and large, we're not exclusively laypeople-- often we ARE the experts. Our math articles are written by math experts, our chemistry articles are written by chemists, our physics articles are written by physicists.
Plus, however difficult it is to understand articles, it's all the more difficult to try to write without any access to them, going exclusively by popular press accounts or abstracts. The results of having access are almost guaranteed to be better than the current situation, where some editors do have access, some editors don't have access, and so it's hard to double-check each other's work.
- Service providers would, I think, be unwilling to catch on to this
idea, given the low image of Wikipedia in many areas of academia.
I'm skeptical the service providers will think much beyond whether its in their own self-interest (be that purely financial, charitable, or PR).
My experience, however, is that everyone in academia LOVES Wikipedia-- a few old fogeys excepted perhaps. But people who like to learn love a giant encyclopedia that's free and has entries on everything.
Academia loves wikipedia-- they just don't like it when it's used for something it's not. A master carpenter loves having a power screwdriver for home repairs-- he just doesn't want to go to his jobsite and find his apprentices clumsily trying to use the blunt side of a power screwdriver to hammer nails.
Alec
My experience is 100% to the contrary. By and large, we're not exclusively laypeople-- often we ARE the experts. Our math articles are written by math experts, our chemistry articles are written by chemists, our physics articles are written by physicists.
I think this is definitely true for articles in many of the hard sciences--maths, physics, chemistry, etc.--but many articles in the soft sciences are written only by hobbyists (for lack of a better word).
Plus, however difficult it is to understand articles, it's all the more difficult to try to write without any access to them, going exclusively by popular press accounts or abstracts. The results of having access are almost guaranteed to be better than the current situation, where some editors do have access, some editors don't have access, and so it's hard to double-check each other's work.
That's true, and you have a point here. If more editors had access to more, reliable content, they would be more able to check one another's work--provided they could understand the content in question.
My experience, however, is that everyone in academia LOVES Wikipedia-- a few old fogeys excepted perhaps. But people who like to learn love a giant encyclopedia that's free and has entries on everything.
Academia loves wikipedia-- they just don't like it when it's used for something it's not. A master carpenter loves having a power screwdriver for home repairs-- he just doesn't want to go to his jobsite and find his apprentices clumsily trying to use the blunt side of a power screwdriver to hammer nails.
I'm not sure you're correct here. Most of academia, in my experience, thinks Wikipedia is useful but flawed. _I_ think Wikipedia is useful but flawed. If Wikipedia didn't claim to be an encyclopedia, and thus claim to abide by all the relevant scholary content standards, it'd be welcomed, I think, in academia.
Cheers,
—Thomas Larsen
Alec Conroy wrote:
On 12/21/08, Thomas Larsen wrote:
I doubt many receivers (of journals, etc.) would be able to understand them well enough. Academic papers aren't always easy to understand, especially for a non-expert, and they could be, God forbid, _misunderstood_.
My experience is 100% to the contrary. By and large, we're not exclusively laypeople-- often we ARE the experts. Our math articles are written by math experts, our chemistry articles are written by chemists, our physics articles are written by physicists.
Plus, however difficult it is to understand articles, it's all the more difficult to try to write without any access to them, going exclusively by popular press accounts or abstracts. The results of having access are almost guaranteed to be better than the current situation, where some editors do have access, some editors don't have access, and so it's hard to double-check each other's work.
Thomas's position smacks of traditional elitism: Why inform the public when the public can't understand what you say? You can't expect informed consent for medical procedures if the public doesn't understand what the doctor is saying, so why say it in the first place?
It may be extremely difficult to understand technical articles that are available; it's absolutely impossible to understand them if they aren't available. At one time the dissemination of detailed technical information was difficult and necessarily expensive. Electronic means have made these difficulties and expenses trivial. We can now present the information to outlying individuals on the long tail of accessibility, without needing to identify who those outlying individuals might be. We can, at no extra cost, make the information available to those who have no use for it at all; making it available does not impose upon them the obligation of availing themselves.
Intellectual property law, at least as envisioned by the framers of the US Constitution, has become counterproductive. The means granted no longer "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," and in a manner unimaginable in the late 18th century. Rather, they impede that progress. Without free access we are condemning our contributors to enforced obsolescence.
- Service providers would, I think, be unwilling to catch on to this
idea, given the low image of Wikipedia in many areas of academia.
I'm skeptical the service providers will think much beyond whether its in their own self-interest (be that purely financial, charitable, or PR).
Yes. A threat to a competitor's own self-interests can be a great motivator to promote Wikipedia's low image. It's comparable to the oil industry's perception of global warming.
Ec
2008/12/24 Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net:
Yes. A threat to a competitor's own self-interests can be a great motivator to promote Wikipedia's low image. It's comparable to the oil industry's perception of global warming.
It's worked for Britannica and Brockhaus! Oh, wait.
- d.
2008/12/24 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
2008/12/24 Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net:
Yes. A threat to a competitor's own self-interests can be a great motivator to promote Wikipedia's low image. It's comparable to the oil industry's perception of global warming.
It's worked for Britannica and Brockhaus! Oh, wait.
Brockhaus never really tried and Britannica is pretty half hearted to the point there not even really the go to people when the media want an anti-wikipedia comment any more. No academic publishing has a highly profitable business model and one they will fight much harder to defend than anyone we've previously run up against. However we cannot meaningfully disrupt their business model (We do not have the strength in the academic world to push open access journals significantly and the wider public is irrelevant to them).
2008/12/25 geni geniice@gmail.com:
Brockhaus never really tried and Britannica is pretty half hearted to the point there not even really the go to people when the media want an anti-wikipedia comment any more.
Yes, I've noticed it getting ad-hoc.
No academic publishing has a highly profitable business model and one they will fight much harder to defend than anyone we've previously run up against.
At this point the prudent move for us is to do nothing and continue to exist. Which has actually worked out surprisingly well for us so far.
However we cannot meaningfully disrupt their business model (We do not have the strength in the academic world to push open access journals significantly and the wider public is irrelevant to them).
The open access journals are termiting them nicely for us. They'll only die on the scale of Microsoft under the onslaught of Linux, or non-free-content educational materials in general under the onslaught of Wikipedia, i.e. not any time soon, but soon enough for us.
All we need to do is continue to exist.
2008/12/25 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
At this point the prudent move for us is to do nothing and continue to exist. Which has actually worked out surprisingly well for us so far.
We've never run into anyone significant who's first reaction is to run to PR people and lobbyists. The PRC is hardly western media friendly and the poor IWF clearly isn't used to people caring about them. The hard Christian right we ran into back in what may? weren't interested in having any impact on the wider media. The various German people have tended not to realise what they are getting into. It's actually quite hard to come up with a company or group that is both rich and media savy that we could end up seriously inconveniencing. School text book people perhaps? Getty might be a candidate but their problem is more the internet as a whole(and since they are still worth a couple of billion they would appear to be surviving that). The pictures of Mohamed thing was already overdone by the time it reached us but some religious groups might be a risk factor I suppose.
2008/12/25 geni geniice@gmail.com:
2008/12/25 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
At this point the prudent move for us is to do nothing and continue to exist. Which has actually worked out surprisingly well for us so far.
We've never run into anyone significant who's first reaction is to run to PR people and lobbyists. The PRC is hardly western media friendly and the poor IWF clearly isn't used to people caring about them. The hard Christian right we ran into back in what may? weren't interested in having any impact on the wider media. The various German people have tended not to realise what they are getting into.
Note that we don't have to be famous to do what we do. Running the #4 website on a budget made of donations is basically a massive pain in the ass.
We just have to (1) do something worth doing (2) be very clear what it is (3) keep doing it. We have that.
It's actually quite hard to come up with a company or group that is both rich and media savy that we could end up seriously inconveniencing. School text book people perhaps?
They're haemorrhaging money without us. If Wikibooks texts start getting used in proper schools, they might worry. But if a Wikibooks text is up to the task, it'll get used in places they don't bother selling to. c.f. Schools-Wikipedia, which was created for SOS Children's Villages to use in their own schools and just happens to have become very popular with teachers around the world.
Getty might be a candidate but their problem is more the internet as a whole(and since they are still worth a couple of billion they would appear to be surviving that).
Getty Images makes its living from the Internet.
The pictures of Mohamed thing was already overdone by the time it reached us but some religious groups might be a risk factor I suppose.
Neutrality and principle is our trump card in such situations.
The existence of this project, despite its highly marketable and credible air of neutrality, does, as an Enlightenment L'Encyclopedie-style project, push a very strong and detailed point of view. So who hates the idea of the core of what we do *that much*? Whose project are we all set to termite horribly?
Wikinews is nice, but unlikely to take over the world any time soon. Commons would be fantastic if the search wasn't poo. Who else?
- d.
Hi Ray,
Thomas's position smacks of traditional elitism: Why inform the public when the public can't understand what you say? You can't expect informed consent for medical procedures if the public doesn't understand what the doctor is saying, so why say it in the first place?
I think you've misunderstood my position. I'm not elitist, but I'm not anti-elite, either. That's just reasonable.
A general, uninformed member of the public must understand what the doctor is saying about their condition. However, they don't have to be able to understand the technical papers that the doctors read and the textbooks that they were trained with--presumably, there would be little need for doctors if this was so. Doctors, thus, are _experts_--experts who interpret the current body of expert knowledge about various medical topics and make it clear to the average member of the public.
Of course, therefore, technical papers don't need, and shouldn't, be written with uneducated members of the public in mind. They need to be as accurate as possible, not dampened down--so that experts can understand them. We want society to move forwards, not be held back by everybody's lack of/varying expertise.
It may be extremely difficult to understand technical articles that are available; it's absolutely impossible to understand them if they aren't available. At one time the dissemination of detailed technical information was difficult and necessarily expensive. Electronic means have made these difficulties and expenses trivial. We can now present the information to outlying individuals on the long tail of accessibility, without needing to identify who those outlying individuals might be. We can, at no extra cost, make the information available to those who have no use for it at all; making it available does not impose upon them the obligation of availing themselves.
You have misunderstood my position again. I don't oppose the concept of the public having free access to journals--in fact, I _very_ strongly support it! I'm a very strong advocate of free content and free access. I'm simply saying that giving general Wikipedians access to journals, via a paid subscription funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, that they will not necessarily understand is nonsensical. What's needed is advocacy for the entirety of academia to make all of their journals free content or at least freely accessible--that will benefit both experts, amateurs, and indeed all the public.
—Thomas Larsen
This is probably how some contributors do good work. They subscribe to a commercial information service, whether it be databases or whole electronic archives of past issues. And, then they crib from it, and they know how to defend results, because they saw details in the experiment, transcript, poll. Maybe they can even see raw data. Local libraries do much the same thing that is talked about in this thread. For instance, if I want a phone number, there still is not a central directory on the internet that I know of, and my library subscribes to a yearly CD database for North America. Back in the eighties, my library subscribed to paper phone directories for the same region. It took about five square metres.