On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 3:32 AM, Gwern Branwen <gwe...@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. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l