[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia: the Journal

[Gwern Branwen]

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