Dear Wiki-research, I'm starting to build the case here in Australia with some universities and academic funding organisations that working with Wikipedia is a good and important part of the educative role of an academic. I'm also conscious that there are quite limited avenues for academics to be able to professionally-justify the time they might devote to improving Wikipedia in their relevant subject area. To that end, I'm beginning to float the idea of a peer-reviewed journal for academics to write Wikipedia articles. [Note, this is not the same as most discussions on this mailing list which are about studying Wikipedia itself]. So, as this list is made up of a high proportion of academics who have a strong interest in Wikipedia I thought I'd like to pass the idea pass you too.
I've written up a first pass at the proposal here: http://www.wittylama.com/2009/09/wikipedia-journal/ (and it's been copied into the Strategic planning wiki proposals here http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Journal ). There are obviously many issues to sort out not the least of which is funding and scope. But, I'd like your feedback on whether you think it a feasible/desirable way to enable greater academic participation in Wikipedia. I.e. by giving added incentives (naming rights, non-editability) and a more familiar format, but at the same time increasing the quality of Wikipedia without having to change its policies or practices. At the same time I hope it would increase the perceived legitimacy of Wikipedia by demonstrating that we care about their expertise and also increases awareness of what free-culture and free-licensing is all about (because the details of the cc-by-sa license would need to be explained to the authors). Just a suggestion, and I thought the people on this list might be the kind of people who might like to recruit their friendly neighbourhood professor to write for the first edition! :-) All the best, -Liam [[witty lama]] wittylama.com/blog Peace, love & metadata
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