<<In a message dated 12/21/2008 1:39:37 A.M. Pacific Standard Time, geniice@gmail.com writes:
Your problem would be getting a big enough group to make it worthwhile. Fairly few wikipedians are going to be interested in any given journal and searching them effectively is quite a trick.>>
I wouldn't advise subscription to *a* journal, but rather to a collation service, that provides access to multiple sources. The ones I mentioned, Ancestry, Genealogy, and NewspaperArchive are all collation services, not journals. Each has hundreds to thousands of individuals sources within them.
Will Johnson
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The idea is a good one, the idea of accessing material online came out of something I suggested (and I seriously doubt I'm alone in doing) in suggesting we find volunteers who could be trusted to verify the content of books being used as references in the case of more contentious and potentially problematic BLPs - asking people to go to libraries, find books and verify what is being inferred in a reference actually exists in the book.
If we can get access to those books for a small pool of trusted users, administrators and such, then that would be brilliant, but I see a couple of problems, I'd say 25% of our biographies are on fairly well known people with plenty of reliable material freely available online, the Einsteins of this world, the bulk of our biogs, say 50-60% are on less well known people where information is harder to come by, but most likely accessible through something like JSTOR, the remainder of our biogs - they would need access to specialist press and publications, stuff that academic targeted resources like JSTOR doesn't really include.
Of course, JSTOR and access to scientific journals could be useful in improving the content of our articles on various scientific stuff, various history journals for our articles of history and so on.
JSTOR, as was said by multiple individuals above, is a perfect candidate to approach. They're non-profit, they have some fulltext, and they could help greatly with out history articles. I have access, and, aside from my semi-permanent habit of navel-gazing, JSTOR was used in some way or another in partically ever article I've substantially edited in the last two years. I imagine my experiences are pretty typical.
Also, perhaps controversially, it seems to me humanities databases are a tiny bit more "within the scope of wikipedia" than the lastest scientific journals. I'd like to see both, but most of the people who need the absolutely lastest, up-to-date word on protein kinases probably have access to the relevant papers already. But humanities change more slowly-- an article on the causes of the french revolution may gradully evolve due to new discoveries-- but not nearly as fast a cutting-edge science article would. There's also a lower field to entry for history/humanities: anyone who is literate can read an article on the Taiping Rebellion-- but a smaller population has the prereqs to immediately read an article about eigenvectors.
That's not to say the latest science journals wouldn't be useful. After all, the true goal here is access for EVERYONE to EVERYTHING.
But, as others have said, JSTOR definitely looks like the low-hanging fruit that might yield the most bang for a foundation's buck.
On 12/21/08, Nick heligolandwp@googlemail.com wrote:
The idea is a good one, the idea of accessing material online came out of something I suggested (and I seriously doubt I'm alone in doing) in suggesting we find volunteers who could be trusted to verify the content of books being used as references in the case of more contentious and potentially problematic BLPs - asking people to go to libraries, find books and verify what is being inferred in a reference actually exists in the book.
If we can get access to those books for a small pool of trusted users, administrators and such, then that would be brilliant, but I see a couple of problems, I'd say 25% of our biographies are on fairly well known people with plenty of reliable material freely available online, the Einsteins of this world, the bulk of our biogs, say 50-60% are on less well known people where information is harder to come by, but most likely accessible through something like JSTOR, the remainder of our biogs - they would need access to specialist press and publications, stuff that academic targeted resources like JSTOR doesn't really include.
Of course, JSTOR and access to scientific journals could be useful in improving the content of our articles on various scientific stuff, various history journals for our articles of history and so on.
-- Nick http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nick http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Nick
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On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 2:23 PM, Alec Conroy alecmconroy@gmail.com wrote:
JSTOR, as was said by multiple individuals above, is a perfect candidate to approach. They're non-profit, they have some fulltext, and they could help greatly with out history articles.
JSTOR also claims ownership over a great deal of indisputably public domain works. I'd hate to think that a penny of my donations to the WMF would be going to support such organizations.
On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 11:06 PM, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote: [snip]
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.
Then as I stated in the old thread I linked to: Get a library card for a nearby university library. In absolute terms it's not cheap, but it's likely the least expensive way for you to get the access... and it doesn't require anything new: you can do it today.
On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 4:08 AM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
JSTOR also claims ownership over a great deal of indisputably public domain works. I'd hate to think that a penny of my donations to the WMF would be going to support such organizations.
If it were a big concern, ring fence your donation?
FT2
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FT2 wrote:
On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 4:08 AM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
JSTOR also claims ownership over a great deal of indisputably public domain works. I'd hate to think that a penny of my donations to the WMF would be going to support such organizations.
If it were a big concern, ring fence your donation?
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
"ring fence"?
Jon-
On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 11:30 PM, Jon scream@datascreamer.com wrote:
If it were a big concern, ring fence your donation?
"ring fence"?
There's this cool thing I heard of once, called the "free dictionary". ;-) http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ring_fence