My suggestion to Sucheta would be to start a website dedicated to the mission, to "first publish" there with appropriate free licensing, and to gradually port over material from there to WP on an topic-by-topic basis, assuming there is also scholarly literature on the topics being covered.
It would also help to submit this documentary and historical website to scholarly review to better establish the work done there as academically reliable. Many of the academic journals include a "website reviews" section in the book reviews section these days.
In short: first go off-wiki to systematize and write. Then document your work as reliable. Then integrate your work with the scholarly work of others and port over piece-by-piece to WP.
My two cents...
Tim Davenport "Carrite" on WP Corvallis, OR
Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2015 19:00:03 +0530 From: Sucheta Ghoshal sucheta.ghoshal@gmail.com To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Is there some Wikimedia project to host contents based on original research? Message-ID: CAF5rHFfSORaOBed=zVi+DocGkn4irP4faeoMZYgXLqTG6YFgMA@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Hi all,
A few of my friends and I have been planning to document the history of counterculture in Bengali art and literature. These friends are also working in that domain professionally, and have access to a huge repository of texts, images, and other relevant details that they are willing to make available digitally in the form of free contents. We wish to have the contents as wikis, and, pictures and video snippets that might be involved - as properly licensed free materials. Now, the concern is if there is some Wikimedia Project that would host contents that are based on such an enormous amount of original research. Wikipedia is certainly not the appropriate place. And, as there exist no earlier works on this particular domain on the internet, references would be negligible. I was thinking about Wikibooks, instead. I am not entirely sure if that fits either, but I assume it fits better than Wikipedia, at least. The last option is to host it ourselves with the MediaWiki setup, and I am considering it very much. But, the idea essentially is to make people edit and enrich it with as much inputs as possible. It would be really helpful, in that case, if it could be placed in one of the Wikimedia projects. Suggestions, of every kind, would be deeply appreciated.
Best, Sucheta