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(a)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
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l