[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia: the Journal

[Brian]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 3:32 AM, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>


Since nobody has pointed to Scholarpedia yet, here is a link:
http://www.scholarpedia.org/

Scholarpedia is a project to have the currently leading expert in a field,
preferably the original researcher or inventor, write up that topic in a
reasonably accessible format. The project is wildly successful. The authors
get to choose the copyright status, whether copyright, GFDL, or BY-NC-DC.
Each article has curators. Anyone (including you) can become a curator.
Eligibility for curatorship is based on several factors including your
scholar index, which is a measure of your contributions to the encyclopedia.

Clearly, this information will not be ported back to Wikipedia. From the
site: "*The approach of Scholarpedia does not compete with, but rather
complements, that of Wikipedia: instead of covering a broad range of topics,
Scholarpedia covers a few narrow fields, but does that exhaustively.*"

A WikiJournal project would have to compete with Scholarpedia for the
attention of academics, and from the perspective of an academic I have a
hard time seeing why Scholarpedia is not preferable.