Talk:Wiki Research Ideas

I'm done with the first draft. I think the problem with this draft is that the proposals don't includle real "action items". Hopefully someone who knows more about how to actually "make proposals" in the WMF context can generate some concrete suggestions? Arided (talk) 20:27, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

What exactly could fall within WMF scope? A new journal is obviously not something you'd want to be done by WMF. --Nemo 07:26, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

IMO the "new way of doing research" part is more interesting than the "new journal" part. If the new journal supports the new way of doing research, then I'm for that. (And I think it can!) I definitely think that "a new way of doing research" is WMF-relevant (precisely insofar as "research" intersects "education".) Arided (talk) 13:48, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

I'm really fond of the idea. It is both a relevant alternative to traditional journal, and a potential golden bridge between research and Wikimedia projects (same license and so forth). The main difficulty here would be to gain a sufficent legitimacy in order to obtain valuable propositions – perhaps a bit of publicity from WMF and the chapters would do no harm. Alexander Doria (talk) 21:57, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

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publishing a list of rejected papers

Publishing a list of rejected papers may not be such a good idea. Many authors will not want to have this info advertised, as they will be at a disadvantage when resubmitting to another journal. Thus, I think this should be optional, while publishing all stages of a paper with reviews and replies to them should be an aim in the case of accepted papers. Pundit (talk) 11:04, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

Problems to watch out for

I worked on a free software-related online magazine (GNOME Journal) for years, and ran into some problems that the creators and maintainers of this project should probably watch out for.

• We didn't have enough system administration and software development capacity, and that hampered forward progress and made editing and publishing tedious.
• Editors didn't have enough consistent time to solicit stories, review and edit articles, and publish the magazine on a regular schedule.
• We didn't have a good succession plan and didn't train future writers, editors and editors-in-chief enough, so the magazine stalled and had long, unplanned hiatuses while the experienced editors had other life priorities.
• I believe that the rest of our larger community (GNOME in this case) did not widely read our output or find it strongly relevant to their work or personal interests, so we didn't get adequate levels of volunteer support in outreach, software improvements, publicity, and iterative improvement in design (what the journal ought to be and do to be useful to its community).

However, it also made for a good learning experience for all involved, provided another entry point into free culture & free software contribution, and led to the publication of many case studies, interviews, overviews, and other articles that future readers (especially novices) will find useful and that otherwise wouldn't have existed.

I'm sharing some lessons from my own experience -- of course your mileage may vary, as the saying goes. But if you think this project will be susceptible to similar issues, hopefully this note will give you some forewarning and an opportunity to plan in advance. :)

Good luck with the effort! Sharihareswara (WMF) (talk) 17:14, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

thanks, Sharihareswara (WMF)! -- C.Koltzenburg (talk) 18:30, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

ISI

What is ISI and why it is important?--Juandev (talk) 11:51, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Focus

So if I understand it well, this journal will be foucusing research articles on Wikimedia "phenomenon" (e.g. all issues related to Wikimedia)?--Juandev (talk) 11:53, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

I don't think so. It's aimed to focus primarily on wiki-research, which does not solely include wikimedia projects. Besides, we may possibly extend a bit this initial scope by adressing wider epistemologic thema on open and collaborative knowledge. Alexander Doria (talk) 12:57, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

I see.--Juandev (talk) 18:00, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Peer-review group

Thats another question which come up to my mind what skills should have such people? Or they will be elected openly? What this will make with the quality of such group? Note that people also thought that Wikipedia, made openly will loose quality. On the other side years ago, we find out that giving feedback on Wikiversity is in colision with its basic pillar to be open (i.e. sometimes you need to hide results). Or is it about how you explain "open"?--Juandev (talk) 12:25, 11 November 2012 (UTC)