Proposal talk:Journal (A peer-review journal to allow/encourage academics to write Wikipedia articles)

Ambitious idea

Ambitious idea. I don't know how journals work really, I'm not a reader of them. But I like the way this encourages academic participation. Adding to my favorites. --Bodnotbod 18:41, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

Impact?

Some proposals will have massive impact on end-users, including non-editors. Some will have minimal impact. What will be the impact of this proposal on our end-users? -- Philippe 00:00, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

It seems to me it will improve the quality of many articles if it results in what is hoped: more academics participating. Research, vital to an academic's tenure and career, is pretty narrowly defined at most universities. Contributing to Wikipedia currently "doesn't count" for a great majority; so academics concentrate on what does count, leaving little time to meaningfully contribute to Wikipedia. We need them.Lyonspen 02:43, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

a few questions

I think it is a good idea. Here are a few questions.

1) Some copyleft journals allow an open review process (example). What do you think about having the review process for this proposed journal be open... let the review process be transparent?

2) What if a group of authors wanted to collaborate? Maybe this proposed journal could provide a multi-author collaboration interface. Either something like Google Knol or a wiki interface that allows authors to control who they collaborate with.

3) I'm concerned about the final step: integration of journal content with Wikipedia. Have you seen Wikipedia:WikiProject Citizendium Porting? That project seems to have limited success integrating scholarly articles into Wikipedia. It even has some cases where folks at Wikipedia flatly refuse to allow content from Citizendium even be considered for inclusion in Wikipedia. I'm thinking about what will happen when experts and scholars write great articles that are rejected by Wikipedia's anonymous editors.

--JWSchmidt 22:15, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

Discussion in the Wikipedia Quality Task Force

Here follows a discussion held in the Wikipedia Quality Task Force that might provide some more ideas.

Scientific pre-prints are often published at www.arxiv.org. Could Wikimedia and arxiv.org colaborate in some way, maybe by providing a section where trusted editors can publish their pre-print. Such colaboration could also increase the likeliness that these editors start editing regular Wikimedia content to. Dafer4515:23, 21 December 2009

Would you please explain? I am a regular contributor of arxiv.org (as a matter of fact, I upload there everything which I eventually send to academic journals). Everybody can upload thinks over there,even though for the first time one nees an endorsement (I think, I myself uploaded the first article there in 1996 when no endorsement was needed). Non of these articles is suitable for Wikipedia because they are in a different format and are not encyclopedic articles, some of them do not meet notability criterion. Or do you mean smth else? Yaroslav Blanter15:27, 21 December 2009

My idea is that if more academics worked closer to a Wikipedia interface, and benefited from it themself, they would be more likely to contribute to the regular material as well. I know this task force is about Wikipedia, but maybe yet another project, wikiscience or something like that where scientists could upload their preprints and colaborate on articles could be useful. The articles could be open to edit by just a few or a single editor, those that colaborate on an article. The article could be unaccesible until finished and when finished it can be published both as pdf and as an ordinary wikipedia-like article. The tex and wikipedia syntax ain't very different, so it should be possible to allow creation of the pdf and wiki-article from the same source.

Apart from making the scientists work closer to a wiki interface I think it also would make the scientific material more accesible to a wider audience. Dafer4515:47, 21 December 2009

The first hurdle I see is that I may not tranfer any of my preprints in PD since eventually they will be published in scientific journals, and I will have to sign the copyright transfer.

Another thing I do not understand is why should the scientists move from arxiv.org to wikiscience, if they are fine already at arxiv.org (which is actually premoderated so that junk like personal attacks does not get published). Yaroslav Blanter13:28, 22 December 2009

Yes I see that there might be some problams and this is just an idea I got and havn't given it very much of a thought before writting it down. But my motivation for the proposal is the following:

• Both Wikimedia and scinece in general has as goal to provide knowledge.
• Both Wikimedia and arxiv.org enables knowledge to be be provided free of charge.
• The mediawiki and tex scripting ain't very different.

I don't think it is possible to move every scientist from arxiv.org to a wikimedia project, and that was not what I intended. But I thought their might be a possibility of collaboration or some kind of merge. Pdf documents can automatically be generated from wikimedia documents. In the same way a wiki page could automatically be generated from a pre-print and in that way be accesible in a format comfortable to a wider audience. When reffering to a scientific work on Wikipedia, this could be done by reffering to the wikidocument which I think is more likely to satisfy a general audience.

At the same time the wiki project could provide scientists with the opportunity to collaborate on a document online, much like for ordinary wiki articles. But editing is restricted to those that collaborate on the article, and the article could also be unaccesible by others until it is published. When published a wikidocument and arxiv article could be automatically produced at the same time.

I don't know how to deal with copyright transfer as I havn't published anything myself, but I can't see the difference between publishing on a wiki project and arxiv as long as the editing is restricted to the actuall authors at the wiki project. Maybe this restriction of editing doesn't follow the wikimedia philosophy very well, but why could a certain project not have such a policy if it is for the greater good of knowledge spreading?

One benefit that I see is that with projects such as wikiversity, wikipdeia and "wikiscience" everyone from preschool up to the research frontier, and also society in general, can have a unified structure for communication, allowing for greater understanding. One problem I, as a university student of physics, has realized is that many of my classmates that wasn't that used to computers had a hard time adapting to writting tex-reports, and had to put much effort into learning this, taking time from the actuall subject studied. If the communication is performed in the same sense at all levels to an as great extent as possible, such waste of effort could be minimized. Dafer4514:17, 22 December 2009

There was a discussion about WikiJournal a while back, on WikiEN-L. I'll dig it up. I definitely think it's worth it, if there isn't a practical matter related to publication which would deter editors and academics from such a scheme. However, if starting such a project is worth considering, do we think it might stand as a recommendation? I think probably not. Worth noting and adding to the incubator and proposals perhaps, but not likely to be viable here? FT2 (Talk | email)20:03, 22 December 2009

Yes, I think I agree with that. Dafer4512:08, 23 December 2009

Arguements for hosting as a WMF project

The one thing is that we want to associate this journal with what everyone is currently reading. With 15% of the global Internet population use Wikipedia on a daily basis and 50-70% of health care providers using Wikipedia regularly, associating this journal with this site would be useful to not only generate press but readership. Another benefit of Wikipedia is that it is working on addressing the costs of cellphone access. Currently many cannot afford to view content on their cellphone due to data charges by the cellphone companies. Two companies have agreed to wave data charges on Wikipedia content for 200 million of their customers in Africa, the Middle East and Asia with employee at the Wikimedia Foundation working on further relationships.

The Wikimedia platform is more flexible than many people realize. The proposed journal of course would be hosted on its own Wikimedia instance and would not be editable by anyone (like Wikipedia). Most of it would only be editable by a small group of verified contributors (this is easy to set up and police). There is also something called "flagged reviews" where the author(s) in question could received suggestion on how to improve the content but would need to approve the changes before they go live. This was sort of the model was used by Citizendium (which failed) but this project was neither associated with Wikipedia nor a major publisher / University.

Yes we would love to get major journals to release there review articles freely. It is would be very useful if they are released under a CC-BY-SA license so that others can build on them or translate them into other languages. If they are just free this is of much less use. I have NOT been successful in getting the World Health Organization to release anything under a license that can be built upon so I have doubts the journals will agree but am willing to give it a try. Getting large amounts of secured funding is very hard to do before something becomes well known / has proved itself. Translators Without Borders would support the translation of content as they are doing currently. And Content Rules would support simplification of content. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 23:22, 1 April 2012 (UTC)