We have about as much talent and personnel as one journal. And an operation of about the same order of magnitude.
Fred > There seems to be a great deal of misunderstanding among Wikipedians > how academe actually works. Piotr thinks a grad student can produce a > scholarly journal. Look at history. In reality it takes hundreds of > scholars working together (almost all of whom are paid professional > salaries by universities.) Printing and mailing costs are only a > fraction of the total expenses for a scholarly journal, so the > advantage of going electronic is small in terms of production costs. > > I talked just now with the editor of ''The Journal of American > History'' --I used to be on its editorial board. It has dozens of > editorial board members and hundreds of unpaid scholars who evaluate > articles and write for it. They are paid not by the Journal but by > their own universities to do this kind of high prestige > "service." (History professors are paid for research, teaching and > service--the average salary in USA for a full professor of history is > $83,000 plus 25% benefits.) The Journal has 14 in-house staff > members, who are paid salaries at rates standard for Indiana > University. Most have PhD's or are PhD candidates--that's eight > years of specialized, expensive post-graduate education. Book > reviews are a main role. They read 3000 new books a year and select > the most important 600 for actual review, using a database of 11,000 > available scholars. 300 full-length manuscripts a year are submitted > and the senior editors and outside reviewers narrow that to the best > 10%. The staffers do intensive quality control on the accepted > articles and are backed by a major university library (which is > expensive.) They occupy nice offices with phones & computers etc that > are also paid for. The Journal pays travel expenses for > meetings. The output is 4 issues a year with 1300 pages of high > quality scholarship delivered to about 10,000 historians and libraries. > > Indeed anyone can try to publish a junk history journal single-handed > and give it away free; almost nobody does so. The software is there > but the necessary expertise is very expensive and takes decades to > develop. It costs real money to produce the "reliable secondary > source" that Wikipedia wholly depends upon. The question is who pays for > it. > > Richard Jensen > > > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l > _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
