http://www.wittylama.com/2009/09/wikipedia-journal/ "Wikipedia currently has no way of addressing any of these issues due to the very nature of it being an “anyone can edit” wiki. This alienates a large number of academics who are already very interested in learning about and contributing to Wikipedia but have difficulty justifying it as legitimate work. Quite simply, academics in many countries/institutions must earn “points” each year to prove they’ve been working and thereby justify to government why their institution should continue to receive funding...One thing that certainly doesn’t earn points is helping to maintain the quality of the content on Wikipedia in the academic’s area of expertise - this is despite the fact that that is precisely where 90% of their students will turn to first to get some background information." "Proposal: The creation of peer-reviewed scholarly e-journal. Academics would be commissioned to write encyclopedic articles on their area of expertise in accordance with our editorial principles (including Neutral POV, Verifiability and No Original Research) and the Wikipedia manual of style. Their article would be submitted to blind peer-review, as per the best-practices of any academically-rigorous journal, by both relevant academics and also a Wikipedian who had been a major contributor to a Featured Article on a similar topic. The final articles would be published in an edition of the “Wikipedia Journal” ready to merge into the existing Wikipedia article on that topic. [Note: this proposal is not the same as "WikiJournal" on Meta (the purpose of which is to encourage Original Research scholarship) or "Wiki Journal" on WikiVersity/Wikia (the purpose of which is to publish articles about Wiki-related scholarship).]" "Articles, once published, could then be merged into the existing Wikipedia article (or a new article created if one did not exist before) and appropriate attribution placed in the external links section of the Wikipedia article to the Author and journal edition. Also, it might be nice to have a talkpage template indicating that an academic had made substantial contributions to the article. *Hopefully* the newly refurbished Wikipedia article could then be taken to Featured Article candidacy relatively quickly." Not a terrible idea. It'd be kind of like the union of specialist online encyclopedias written by single authors, such as the Stanford Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. But I suspect the author is a little too sanguine about how easy it would be to incorporate these big new articles into actual WP articles - and if they don't get integrated, then they're not serving their purpose. -- gwern