Talk:WikiJournal User Group/Archive 2017

Latest comment: 6 years ago by Evolution and evolvability in topic Ethics statement

User group membership

I am much in favour of experimentation in this area and have done (and continue to do) a fair bit myself, so I welcome the creation of a user group on the topic. However, whenever I come here to find out more about this user group, I am confused as to why there is no way to sign up as a member of the user group. I might well be interested in becoming a member of the WikiJournal Council, but discussing that should probably not be the first step of engagement of new members with this user group. --Daniel Mietchen (discusscontribs) 06:50, 21 January 2017 (UTC)Reply

Hi Daniel! You don't need to sign up anywhere to contribute. In fact, I personally prefer that participants sign up for specific tasks, such as (for WikiJournal of Medicine) reviewers or associate editors. I've notified other Council members about your interest in joining, and I'd welcome your help in any improvement on the overall organization. The main activity, however, is happening in individual journals. Also, if you feel that journal is needed in another subject than medicine or science, you may help in creating such a journal. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 14:20, 22 January 2017 (UTC)Reply
Hi again, Daniel! I now added you to the council, after receiving no contention from other members. I thus recommend that you add this page to your watchlist, and add your email at the public mailing list at: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/wikijournal (reached by emails to wikijournal googlegroups.com). Also, I hope you find something at the Contribute list that interests you. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 05:44, 25 January 2017 (UTC)Reply
Thanks, Mikael — I have subscribed to the mailing list. --Daniel Mietchen (discusscontribs) 05:56, 25 January 2017 (UTC)Reply

Advertisements in Wikipedia's Wikiprojects

Last week I posted advertisements for both Wiki.J.Med and the new Wiki.J.Sci in the pages of several WikiProjects (WJM_advert_2017_Jan, WJS_advert_2017_Jan). Please expect an uptick of interest and submissions. I recommend watching this page, as well as the talk pages Talk:WikiJournal_of_Medicine and Talk:WikiJournal_of_Science. In particular, Wiki.J.Sci is still being established, so clarifying its procedures will be useful. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 04:21, 25 January 2017 (UTC)Reply

Great! WikiProjects posted to so far can be seen at the WhatLinksHere of the template. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 13:11, 1 February 2017 (UTC)Reply

My efforts have evolved away from a forma journal, to a quick way to "showcase" student efforts. I find the following header on documents ot be useful because I can print out a pdf of the permalink that automatically links to the latest version.

<small>If this is in online [[w:Portable Document Format|PDF]] format, view the wikitext by clicking https:{{SERVER}}/w/index.php?oldid={{REVISIONID}}. "Resource" in upper right corner displays latest version. </small>

placed at the top of the page results in this header:

If this is in online PDF format, view the wikitext by clicking https://en.wikiversity.org/w/index.php?oldid=2197855. "Resource" in upper right corner displays latest version.

To see a sample, download and view this online as a pdf file: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/File:Talk_WikiJournal_WikiJournal_User_Group_-_Wikiversity.pdf On any browser I have used clicking the top line leads to the permalink. Is that true for your browser?--Guy vandegrift (discusscontribs) 15:18, 26 January 2017 (UTC)Reply

Yes, it's the same in my browser. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 13:12, 1 February 2017 (UTC)Reply

Rename main page to just "WikiJournal"

This seems like common sense to me. Any objections? I tried to be bold and rename it myself but it seems like an admin will need to do it. --Felipe (discusscontribs) 11:45, 1 February 2017 (UTC)Reply

I would have preferred simply "WikiJournal" as well, but the "User Group" addition is a necessary addition as a Wikimedia User Group which we did try to negotiate ourselves away from (but didn't succeed). However, we may apply for becoming a "thematic organization", perhaps this year or the next, and in that case we may not need to display the "User Group" any more. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 13:30, 1 February 2017 (UTC)Reply

WikiJournal.org

Felipe and I had a talk with the domain owner of wikijournal.org recently, and it is possible to merge our projects if we attain a WikiJournal/Future as separate Wikimedia project - see also talk entry there at en.wikijournal.org/wiki/Talk:WikiJournal. I think the most important next step is to become a "thematic organization", proving that we can work as a separate organization: I can start a draft of bylaws soon. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 20:20, 24 February 2017 (UTC)Reply

A generalist WikiJournal, and specialized sub-journals

Hi again! Some weeks ago I proposed merging all WikiJournals into one, due to the reasons explained here. The proposal didn't achieve consensus, but now I think there's a variation that may have all the benefits of a merge, and none of the drawbacks. How about we recast the WikiJournal of Science as a generalist journal titled just "WikiJournal", and leave the WikiJournal of Medicine as a specialized sub-journal? As the main WikiJournal grows, groups of users may of course branch off creating new specialized sub-journals. What do you think? --Felipe (discusscontribs) 14:23, 28 February 2017 (UTC)Reply

I think this sounds like a great idea to have one general WikiJournal as well as WikiJournal of Medicine. The frequency of publications can then be a guideline for when it's time to fork them into further sub-specialties. However, the other board members of WikiJournal of Science (Guy vandegrift, Marshal Sumter and Michael Umbricht) should also have a say in this. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 18:13, 1 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
I personally feel that WikiJournal of Science should exist and should be developed further. If a generic WikiJournal is developed, that is a different thing altogether. I do not think that the heading 'WikiJournal of Science' needs to be dismantled. I am eager to hear the views of people from WikiJournal of Science. Diptanshu.D (discusscontribs) 18:36, 1 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
@Diptanshu.D: Hi, I'm not sure you're aware that I'm the current chief editor and, at least lately, the only active user of the WJS. If a generalist WikiJournal is approved but the WJS is preserved, I will abandon the WJS and start contributing to the generalist WikiJournal. Also, the WJS aimed to be a generalist journal from the start (it's "science" in the broad sense of "knowledge") so turning it into a generalist journal called "WikiJournal" would be quite in line with its original goal. So I think it makes little sense to preserve the WJS, if a generalist WikiJournal is approved. But sure, lets wait and see what the others say. --Felipe (discusscontribs) 19:11, 1 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
I will defer to the active members of WJS. As Diptanshu.D pointed out, the original intent of the WJS was to be broad in scope, primarily on the grounds that we can later specialize as other journals emerge.--Guy vandegrift (discusscontribs) 00:14, 2 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Felipe: Pardon me for not having properly followed up with WJS. Although WJS intends to be a generalist journal, I presume it would not be a journal of simply anything. It would still adhere to topics under the domains of science. So, I feel that it would perhaps be a better idea to create another WikiJournal (general) for the purpose of inclusion of any random topic. I would perhaps not be able to play a very active role due to various engagements at the moment but still I am willing to help. Diptanshu.D (discusscontribs) 19:58, 2 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
@Diptanshu.D: Well, the way I see it, the issue is this: if we agree to create a generalist journal called just "WikiJournal", then I'd jump right in and do it, as it's the idea I'm most interested in. But if I do, then the WJS would become pretty much abandoned, as I'm the most active user there. On the other hand, the goal of the WJS has always been to include all kinds of knowledge, not just scientific knowledge in the ordinary sense of "science" (right Guy?). Given those two facts, it seems clear, at least to me, that the best solution is to just rename the WJS to "WikiJournal" and continue developing it under that title. Later, if a sub-community of scientists emerges under the generalist WikiJournal, we may re-create the WJS, or maybe a WikiJournal of Physics, or WikiJournal of Biology, depending on the nature of the sub-community. Makes sense?
@Guy vandegrift: I'm not sure I understand your comment (it was me who pointed out that the original goal of the WJS was to be broad in scope, not Diptanshu). Anyway, do you support the idea of renaming the WJS to just "WikiJournal" to make it clearer that it's a generalist journal, and then allow other more specialized journals to emerge organically? --Felipe (discusscontribs) 20:47, 15 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
I think that we should introduce an idea of WikiJournal General or General WikiJournal (or any other equivalent term for the same) and keep WikiJournal unoccupied as a generic all-encompassing congregational term for each of the languages. I also feel that in case peer-review is made not-mandatory for any segment, that segment be inevitably be labelled as magazine and not journal. WikiJournal should stand upto the name of journals which are essentially scholarly or academic in nature. Diptanshu.D (discusscontribs) 15:52, 16 March 2017 (UTC)Reply


Developing WikiJournal project at wikijournal.org

Previous discussion including the speculation about moving content to external server of wikijournal.org

Hello all from WikiJournal User Group!

My name is Philip and I am a founder of Wikijournal.org website. I got acquainted with Felipe Schenone and Mikael Häggström and started negotiations on possible merging of WikiJournal of Science/Medicine at Wikiversity with WikiJournal.org on the same principles and mission objectives as it has Wikimedia Foundation.

For your information: I started WikiJournal project end of 2012 by launching only its Russian edition at wikijournal.ru, but I did want to make the international platform for Wikijournal and purchased wikijournal.org and continued to develop the project with launching three localizations: Russian (ru.wikijournal.org), English (en.wikijournal.org) and German (de.wikijournal.org) soon I guess there will be launched Spanish and Italian editions. Now only Russian edition is quite developed and has more than 200 published articles. English version has just few articles and other localization hasn't articles yet.

So I would invite all to participate at our common idea and make one big WikiJournal project. I launched the process to become a sister project of Wikimedia Foundation and it will take time. If Wikijournal obtain the status the project itself will have a support from the Foundation for further developing, but of course it takes time and we keep working on it.

You all welcome to join and participate in discussion of the project at talk page of Wikijournal: https://en.wikijournal.org/wiki/Talk:WikiJournal

Feel free to post you messages, share ideas about WikiJournal and ask me any questions.

Kind wishes,

Philip

--Fokebox (discusscontribs) 10:05, 1 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

Dear Philip
It is good to hear from you. I appreciate the effort that you have put in developing the Russian version of wikijournal.org (ru.wikijournal.org). It is really good to know that you are interested in forming a thematic organization for WikiJournal(s). A number of things need to be discussed and sorted out before we can take it further. We, at WikiJournal User Group have tried to develop open access peer reviewed academic journals under the bannerhead of Wikimedia Foundation such that neither authors nor readers need to pay anything. The projects are volunteer driven and do not generate any revenue for us. In contrast, your wikijournals.org is advertisement driven and after achieving a minimal stable traffic is generating a certain ad revenue. You are welcome to join hands with us, but in that case you would have to make certain choices. You can choose to merge the projects and cease to earn the ad revenue or you can choose to set up a parallel project at may be wikimag.org (available) in accordance to the tagline "Free, independent, international online magazine" (see this source). Apart from continuing to generate ad revenue for you, in case of the latter you would also have the option of keeping it devoid of the peer review process or quality control stringency that we try to adhere to for WikiJournal of Medicine. This is a choice you would have to make. We would be happy to discuss about the possibility of integrating your wikijournal into our wikijournal but while your approach was rather generic, our efforts were rather toward developing speciality journals under the generic WikiJournal project head.
A merge would definitely be beneficial for us. But I would like to hear your take on the above.
Regards
Diptanshu.D (discusscontribs) 18:28, 1 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Dear Diptanshu
Thank you for your message. I have already made my decision. All ads will be removed from all wikijournal localizations this week and the website will be absolutely free for all as for authors and readership. I decided to follow Wikimedia mission and principles to provide information for free to everyone. So I think only in this case the journal will be 100% fully free and independent. That's why I have started the procedure to obtain the status of sister project of Wikimedia so the project can have support from it, technical, financial and as well as on donations from readers and authors if they wish to do that. So Wikijournal will be volunteer driven without any revenues from you, for me. I think that the project can have only grants to achieve some goals and tasks.
What about open access peer reviewed academic journals, so this idea can be also implemented at Wikijournal (in the science category) may be some categories can be excluded from reviewing, but scientific articles yes they can be and probably should be reviewed due to its specification.
Fokebox (discusscontribs) 20:38, 1 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
All ads at wikijournal.org are completely removed
Fokebox (discusscontribs) 07:23, 2 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Dear Philip
It is indeed great to hear that you have made up your mind and are looking forward to the merger. Since we do not have a profit-oriented mindset the financial requirement of our WikiJournals is limited and is practically restricted to one time or recurrent fees payable to certain affiliating bodies. The hosting arrangements are provided by Wikimedia Foundation and the software platform used is Mediawiki. This is not where the problem lies.
The problem is with respect to inclusion of the contents that you have already developed. I am not sure whether the already published articles can be peer-reviewed, and if so, whether you are really ready to go through the pains required for the same. It takes both time and effort for the procedure to be followed. The process involves inclusion of independent experts who can make it happen. I do not see any room of exclusion of the review process. Whether it is scientific or something else, each article needs to be reviewed in order to ensure quality. Unless the standards are maintained, the credibility/strength is no more than that of the weakest link in the chain.
Let us take a few examples.
Informative and image rich articles like Maiden Waterfall braids are impressive and great. But if it were to be a peer reviewed academic article, it would have needed improvisations.
  • Information like Waterfall height is about 25 meters and a width of 5 to 10 meters. would need to be backed by proper references. You either did the measurements yourself (wherein your are the primary source and take the responsibility for the new information introduced) or you got it from somewhere. You need to include the sources to indicate that you did not make it up. Practically each sentence of such an article would need to be referenced.
  • The image credits for images like this would not be restricted to the information included in the page. The photographer (or the copyright holder) would need to be acknowledged and the image(s) would need to be released into the public domain (or other compatible license - MH). The copyright holder could upload the images into Commons directly or could released the rights using OTRS system.
Articles like How to properly drink water would have to undergo a more stringent review.
  • Information like According to scientists the human body is 60% water. would need to be appropriately referenced.
  • Claims like For only 0 calories you can... reduce risk of cancer would need to be validated and pseudoscientific claims would need to be distinguished from scientific ones.
  • Even apparently harmless statements like If a person is going to lose weight, water consumption - the best option need validation.
As you would understand that building a journal is not easy. I appreciate the efforts that you have given in bringing so many articles to life, but those articles need to be groomed before they can be taken to the next phase. I hope that you understand.
Regards
Diptanshu.D (discusscontribs) 19:40, 2 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
@Fokebox: Hi Philip! I'm really glad you decided to join the Wikimedia movement and merge the two projects. I'm reading there are some concerns regarding the peer review of your existing content, but I think that is something that will be sorted out with time and effort, like Diptanshu.D says. We would simply need to mark the articles as in need of peer review and continue developing the journal. As the project grows, reviewers will slowly appear. As Diptanshu said, building a journal is not easy, and requires patience. Also, not being peer reviewed doesn't imply that the articles can't be published! They WILL be published (aka available), just with the mark of not being peer reviewed, or alternatively without the mark of being peer reviewed. In any case, with such willing and selfless pals like yourself and Diptanshu, we'll sort it out!!! Welcome to the team, and thanks for welcoming us to yours, I look forward to what's coming! --Felipe (discusscontribs) 21:06, 2 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Hi Diptanshu!
Since we do not have a profit-oriented mindset the financial requirement of our WikiJournals is limited and is practically restricted to one time or recurrent fees payable to certain affiliating bodies. The hosting arrangements are provided by Wikimedia Foundation and the software platform used is Mediawiki. This is not where the problem lies.
That's really great that you have such attitude. But I have a little bit another situation. Now WikiJournal works without any support. Hosting and other technical arrangements need my own expenses, that the main reason of my "profit-oriented mindset" to cover current expenses, but anyway I am oriented to make true, free and independent journal and develop independent journalism with the help of people all over the world as well as go along with Wikimedia mission that's why I am on the process to apply WikiJournal as sister project to have any support provided by Wikimedia itself, so that the idea of the WikiJournal can be fully realized and works for people.
The problem is with respect to inclusion of the contents that you have already developed. I am not sure whether the already published articles can be peer-reviewed, and if so, whether you are really ready to go through the pains required for the same. It takes both time and effort for the procedure to be followed. The process involves inclusion of independent experts who can make it happen. I do not see any room of exclusion of the review process. Whether it is scientific or something else, each article needs to be reviewed in order to ensure quality. Unless the standards are maintained, the credibility/strength is no more than that of the weakest link in the chain.
Well, I wouldn't call it as a problem. I didn't have an idea that my articles should be strictly scientific. I expressed my own experience (for example in articles about waterfalls). I visited the locations on my own, made a series of photos and described the locations for those who probably look for information about it. I didn't measure the waterfalls sizes with some tools and there is no need to indicate any references about it, because I made articles about it what I experienced. The idea wasn't to provide exact scientific data about the waterfall, so my articles don't need to be scientifically proved or rejected. I do agree that articles at category Science at wikijournal should have all this scientific strict criteria and to be reviewed by respected people and should be proved as a scientific fact etc. I also agree that the content itself is very important, it should be improved if there is a need on the basis of advices of other users at the project to create really quality, qualitative content. And I agree with Felipe that articles can have some marks that they reviewed or not and fits the criteria of WikiJournal of Science/Medicine or what ever. That's my opinion. I think many issues will be resolved as long as we go forward.
Fokebox (discusscontribs) 13:19, 3 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Thanks Philip for your consideration. I am sure that we can take it forward. I agree with Felipe that simply marking those articles with Peer review pending or something similar should take care of the issues for now and we can get them sorted later on. It is really assuring to hear that you are not profit driven in the endeavour. You have already done great work on the russian wikijournal that you have created. The articles can subsequently be developed further. The images can be directly added to commons so that other projects can benefit from them. The hosting and other expenses would automatically get taken care of once the projects get merged.
Titodutta, Rjwilmsi and WhatamIdoing: Could you take a look and suggest what can be done next? As of now, WikiJournal is hosted on Wikiversity. Philip is the owner of wikijournal.org wherein he had set up and was running his own wikijournal. After several discussions he has expressed his willingness to merge the projects and to let it come under wikimedia projects. In such a case, the pages on one end (ours or his - both using MediaWiki) need to be migrated and such that a common platform is set. Now that we have the domain (courtesy: Philip), it would perhaps be more suitable to get the entire stuff shifted to wikijournal.org. Requesting for technical feedback from you.
Mikael and James: Looking forward to your inputs and suggestions. Thomas: We would need your inputs for the execution of such a task. Felipe and Guy vandegrift: Your involvement in the entire process is solicited.
I JethroBT (WMF), Asaf, Satdeep and User:Ocaasi (WMF): Could you please provide your inputs about what is to be done next? It would also be helpful if you could connect us to the right people from Wikimedia whose participation might be required in such a case. I understand that such a thing might call for some MOUs (memorandum of understanding) or stuff like that. But that can be done easily and should not be something major. Mikael will help in drafting the by-laws. Could you also care to get us connected to the right people for the same?
Also requesting participation and inputs from Ozzie10aaaa, Bluerasberry, CFCF, Shyamal.
Any other user who had participated in meta:WikiJournal is welcome. Anybody else: Please feel free to put in your inputs.
Regards Diptanshu.D (discusscontribs) 17:09, 3 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
That's great! Yes, I confirm that Wikijournal.org is ready for merging and further development as well as I keep developing my current articles and make them better . Please, keep me informed what can be done from my side. Also I offer to create a special page at wikijournal.org with structure of users involved to the project and their responsobilities or roles that they have for now, so that I can understand who is who. Keep me posted. One more detail - next week I will be on vocation with limited access to Internet, so pardon me if I don't reply to your messages. --Fokebox (discusscontribs) 20:17, 3 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
This is an interesting development! I agree that the current articles at wikijournal.org that do not have peer review can still be included, as long as there is a display for each article that external peer review is pending. I think the most important thing is that the mission of WikiJournal is preserved: to receive scholarly works with no cost for the authors, apply quality checks on submissions by peer review, and make accepted works available on the Internet free of charge, in perpetuity.
As Wikipedia aims to give every single person on the planet is free access to the sum of all human knowledge, WikiJournal aims to allow every single person to expand that knowledge. Yet, to be useful we must have some quality control too, and even if users can correct errors while viewing, we will not be regarded as a serious project if we don't have independent peer review of articles. I understand it will take time to do this for hundreds of articles, and therefore we can work on a merger beforehand, as long as it is the aim in the long term to have them peer reviewed. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 20:45, 3 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

First of all, I want to congratulate all on the level-headed discussion on a complex topic. The main constraint on academic journals is that they live or die by their reputation and their inclusion in services such as PUBMED, PMC, MEDLINE, Google Scholar, DOAJ, etc. Each of these typically has strict requirements for published content to be peer reviewed and carefully checked for quality. The wikijournal.org website is currently a slightly different concept to an academic journal, and is more like the newspaper use of the term of journal. One possibility if a merger does go ahead, is that content is clearly split into sister journals with different formats (currently the direction that the WikiJournal User Group seems to be moving in). This would be inline with other academic journal publishing houses such as: Nature Publishing Group, Public Library of Science (PLOS), British Medical Journal, Springer etc. Each of these publishes peer reviewed journals each with a different focus, as well as a blog or magazine that is not peer reviewed. The main complication is that the non peer-reviewed content from academic publishing houses is typically closely aligned to the peer reviewed journals. One possible structure is:

  • WikiJournal / WikiJournal User Group / WikiJournal Publishing Group - the top level with a welcome page that lists the journals and can be the thematic organisation etc
    • WikiJournal of Medicine - Peer reviewed medical journal (flagship journal)
    • WikiJournal of Science - Peer reviewed STEM journal (in planning stages)
    • Other academic WikiJournals - Peer reviewed academic journals for other broad topic areas e.g. Social science (not yet created)
    • WikiJournal One - Peer reviewed journal for any topics that don't fit anywhere else (not yet created)
    • WikiJournal magazine / WikiJournal blog / something - Non peer reviewed content that can operate without the strict controls necessary for academic journals

The main risk with the non-peer reviewed content is that it could appear to readers to have fewer references than corresponding Wikipedia articles. The development of the academic WikiJournals will have be guided by the requirements of both the Wikimedia Foundation, and the running of scholarly journals. We can afford to move forward cautiously whilst Wiki.J.Med (and others) build up their content. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 11:01, 7 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

I'm glad that there's so much good will about the merge. In order to actually do the merge, I think the right tools are Special:Export and Special:Import. I can take care of the job of moving all the relevant content and documentation to wikijournal.org, if no one opposes. --Felipe (discusscontribs) 12:28, 8 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
It think it's best to wait at least 2 weeks before moving any content. There are a few board members who've been away and it'd be best to make sure that everyone is clear on exactly what is being moved where and merged with what. An intermediate step could be formatting some draft of what the main WikiJournal pages could look like and discussing specific points:
Thinking about these specifics may also help to frame the discussion about keeping the reputations of the peer-reviewed journals separate from the non-peer reviewed content. The points above are just a few things that came to mind, not an exhaustive list. I absolutely don't want it to seem like a hostile takeover of Philip's website, but at the same time it is important to identify the strengths and weaknesses in both WikiJMed and WikiJournal.org! I look forward to hearing other peoples' ideas and opinions. Once we are clear on the specifics, there should be an explicit vote before any movement of content. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 00:02, 9 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
I agree we should wait at least 2 weeks before making any move. Also, before discussing technical specifics, we need to be sure that we are all likely to be happy with the expected results. I would personally not be happy about adopting any magazine-like project that does not have any peer review. Philip seems to write reasonable articles himself, but sooner or later random visitors would start to write rubbish, which would drag the entire reputation of WikiJournal down. For example, if there is no Notability policy, some articles would not attract readers, obliterating the chances of anybody detecting obvious flaws. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 19:37, 9 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
I think that the fortnight's wait period is justifiable. Mikael is right that the magazine approach could go wrong; but then, it would not really be an unmoderated one. The process of submissions being approved by a board should essentially be present. The magazine label is just to distinguish that the contents are not peer reviewed. I do not have any denial to the fact that Philip writes reasonably good articles, the topics for his articles are credible as well. But that does not distinguish them from a blog entry. We would have to create a distinction to prevent the chances of subsequent abuse (not by Philip). I would justify Thomas's apprehension on the issue of the reputation of the peer-reviewed journals and would maintain the significance of non-peer reviewed content being segregated. I am not sure that a simple 'non-peer reviewed' or 'peer review awaited' template tag would be enough. Unless we do that, the contents would no longer remain 'freely integrable into Wikipedia'.
Philip, you have my deepest respects. But when we define protocols, we have to keep a number of things in consideration so that things do not go wrong in the future (Murphy's Law still stands valid though). Kindly bear with us for the prolonged discussion.
Felipe, I am not sure that you would be able to import or export the pages using Special:Export and Special:Import. The domain wikijournal.org would need developer intervention first to be integrated with other Wikimedia projects to allow the use of the same user databases for logging in. Perhaps there is role of certain MediaWiki fine tuning as well. Prior to this being done, the current contents of wikijournal.org would need to be exported (possibly in xml format). The xml can be imported after the subdomain system (or other rules) are defined and put in place. We would require WMF personnel, #wikimedia-commtech and MediaWiki developers for this. Seeking the interventions of Ryan Kaldari (WMF) and Jönsson for the same. That does not need to wait. Diptanshu.D (discusscontribs) 15:33, 11 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Hello all, thank you for your ideas. Let me share what I think and what can be done.
First of all the WikiJournal probably should not be strictly scientific - It can be the major part of the Journal called WikiJournal of Science and it can be divided into several parts like Wikijournal of Medicine, Wikijournal of Biology etc (Articles that included these categories should be of course peer reviewed. And I think that other categories can exist where authors are allowed to publish relevant, useful content (not necessarily strictly scientific) for example I published some reviews on lenses, locations etc. Such articles shouldn't be necessarily reviewed and they are quite informative and useful for readers and journal itself. I have various such articles in Russian.
I agree that medical content should be removed from from Russian version (e.g. water, malaria, blood donation). It will be done right after merging.
Let me know what can be done from my side!
I would also like to know how many articles are expected to be merged?
And my purpose - Let's do something pracrical on couples of articles. Also let me know who can be a beurocrat. Felippe may be you? --Fokebox (discusscontribs) 19:07, 14 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Fokebox (discusscontribs) 08:59, 14 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Diptanshu.D: Thanks for pinging me. I don't think Community Tech could solve the problem of integrating the site with the Wikimedia projects (e.g. for logging in), because there are legal and security aspects that'd need to be handled, and I'd assume the easiest way to solve those are the process of becoming a Wikimedia project that Fokebox mentions above (but I could be mistaken – this is not my area of expertise). /Johan (WMF) (discusscontribs) 20:44, 14 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Diptanshu.D I think it is too early to think about such aspect yet (common log in with Wikimedia projects etc.). WikiJournal isn't legally incorporated and doesn't have a special status. Now the activity at the website is important - registered users, published content, clear policy and structure that we discuss here. As most of the group discussed policy of peer reviewed articles they it is all can be done at Science category of WikiJournal, for example here: https://en.wikijournal.org/wiki/Portal:Science. And the main page will have recently added articles in each category.
I have also applied for grant at Wikimedia here ... feel free to join: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Philip/WikiJournal.org/WikiJournal so I can reimburse expenses and concentrate my attention on the project.
Hi guys. So I asked on the Wikimedia mailing list what's the best approach regarding the merge of user accounts, which is the most delicate technical issue if the project is to become a sister project. Someone answered saying that it'd probably be handled the same as Wikivoyage was (see here and here). Basically, users with the same username in wikijournal.org and WMF get their accounts merged, users in wikijournal.org whose username isn't used on WMF get an account on WMF and accounts get merged, and users in wikijournal.org whose username conflicts with someone else on WMF have to rename their account. He also recommended we install the Extension:OAuthAuthentication to authenticate new users against Meta, and disable any further local account creations, in order to reduce the number of people that will need renaming if the WikiJournal gets accepted as a sister project. I think these are all excellent advices and solve the only technical issue I can foresee regarding the merge. The rest of the issues are more about organization and can be discussed and solved more effectively after the merge. --Felipe (discusscontribs) 19:37, 15 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Hi Felipe. I think that's not an important issue and even technical problem in case to have one common user base. There are just 28 registered users and most of them inactive. The most important step is to have activity among registered users and start uploading articles (at least to English version of Wikijournal). The parallel issue is to have legally incorporated status (register as official company) - for that particular issue I applied for Wikimedia grand.
Felipe how can I know the number of articles to be merged into one project. I think we should do something practical to have interest from Wikimedia to include WikiJournal as sister project and have its direct support.--Fokebox (discusscontribs) 07:29, 16 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
It is good to know that Felipe has progressed with the discussion with WMF. Indeed things should proceed in the same way as in case of Wikivoyage. I hope that technical guys from WMF would be able to handle the stuff. That should also take care of the hosting issues (expense related) as pointed by Philip in the grants page. But we need to be clear about one thing. We need to understand that we who have been working on Wikimedia projects like Wikipedia, WikiJournal of Medicine, WikiJournal of Science etc., try to adhere to a philosophy. It is the philosophy of neutrality, verifiability and commitment to quality that makes us who we are. We should never compromise on this philosophy. Although I do not question the dedication and intent of Philip, he is perhaps yet to familiarize himself with this philosophy. I am quite certain that he would imbibe it. I would strongly insist Philip to involve himself into Wikipedia editing. He can try and incorporate his experiences and knowledge into Wikipedia (the same thing that he has been trying to do through WikiJournal). In the process he would learn many of the intricacies of Wikipedia editing. I am quite certain that this in turn would enrich his way of contributing to WikiJournal.
Talking about WikiJournals, there are two things to be distinguished. One thing is the specific domain like Science or Medicine which form the subject matter on which the WikiJournal articles are based. The other thing is the philosophy and the quality control of the journal. I feel that in any case the latter should never be compromised. What distinguishes a journal from a blog? It is this quality control measure. Peer reviews and referencing is an intricate part of this quality control. Unless that is maintained, such a journal would lack credibility and would never be counted as a reliable source. So, irrespective of the subject matter (be it WikiJournal of Science, History, Commerce or simply General WikiJournal), peer review and scholarly/academic cultures should be considered a pre-requisite. It is ok that Philip had not known about these earlier and had written his articles differently. As of now we can label them as peer review pending but that should not be considered as a license to drop peer-review from any of the WikiJournals.
In case of confusion on any such matters, we can solve it in the same way that we do on Wikimedia projects like Wikipedia. Its by forming a consensus. We can simply open a vote, pool the opinions and decide further course of action based on whichever direction the consensus indicates. You may refer to the name change discussion in this context. Diptanshu.D (discusscontribs) 15:47, 16 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

With respect to the other WikiJournal.

(1) they are not under an open license but under a CC BY SA NC license

(2) does not look like they are involved in the publishing of academic peer reviewed articles[2]

(3) not sure why the history tab is turned off?

(4) within the WM movement we have been discussing the concept of a WP journal since at least 2009[3][4][5]

Doc James (discusscontribs) 15:59, 17 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

I am eager to hear Philip's response. At meta:Grants talk:Project/Philip/WikiJournal.org/WikiJournal#The way Wikimedia projects work I have left the following response which is also relevant to this discussion.
Fokebox: I would need to strongly differ from you in this regard. Moving to Wikimedia servers is a pre-requisite. We are aspiring to becoming a Wikimedia sister project. So, this is very important. If you do not agree to this, there is no way we can move forward. Besides, Doc James has rightly pointed out that the license used on your servers is not same as that used by the Wikimedia servers. That is very crucial too. Unless you decide to use CC-BY-SA-4, no merger would be possible. You also need to agree to quality control and peer-reviews if you are willing to go forward with us. As such, we would be happy to incorporate your domain wikijournal.org but that is not indispensable for us as we have other options including journal.wikimedia.org (similar to the already operative species.wikimedia.org for WikiSpecies). We would just have liked to avoid the unnecessary confusion created by an independent use of the same name. We would be most happy to find you among us and would like to extend full community support but you would have to decide your priorities. You would need to decide whether you want to move with Wikimedia and benefit from collaborative efforts or whether you want to be independent. If you decide to move along with us, adhering to Wikimedia principles of transparency and commitment to quality would be essential. I wish to hear your response in this regard. DiptanshuTalk 05:06, 19 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
I am keen to hearing back Philip's response in the context of the issues raised by Doc James and myself in present discussion. I assure you that we are eager to redistribute the burden you had been bearing upon yourself till now. I understand that you treasure what you have painstakingly built but assure you that you can be a part of something bigger and that we are eager to incorporate the contents that you have produced till date. We can leave the contents tagged as peer review pending for now. But for that to happen, you and your editors would need to agree to adopt the C-BY-SA license by dropping the NC (non-commercial) portion of it. On the other hand, as described by you at your Grant request, the structure (including hosting, technical assistance etc.) have been necessary evils which can easily be disposed off in case you decide to merge with our Wikimedia project. Your judgment will play a crucial role in this regard and I am eager to hear your say. Diptanshu.D (discusscontribs) 05:20, 19 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Let me add that you might find the tools provided by your present hosting to be useful but I assure you that developers under Wikimedia projects have developed a vast array of custom-made tools that will far exceed the utility of the tools provided by your hosting. Additionally in case you have a tool idea, they can easily get it built for you here if you decide to merge with our Wikimedia project. Whether you want to go for it, the choice resides entirely with you. Diptanshu.D (discusscontribs) 05:26, 19 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

Hello Diptanshu.D, Doc James and all others who is involved to the WikiJournal development. Thank you for your comments and let e clarify some points just to escape misunderstanding. First of all I do interested in WikiJournal development and to make it Mediawiki sister project (I wrote about it above several times) and I am ready to do all necessary steps and fulfil the requirements from my side to achieve this goal to obtain the status. According to your messages I think the following:

(1) they are not under an open license but under a CC BY SA NC license
(2) does not look like they are involved in the publishing of academic peer reviewed articles[2]
(3) not sure why the history tab is turned off?
(4) within the WM movement we have been discussing the concept of a WP journal since at least 2009
  1. Now they are under open license (Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported). The previous license (under a CC BY SA NC) was set before we started discussing the WikJournal due its old policy. Now it is changed. I don't mind at all to provide open license.
  2. The users are not involved in the publishing of academic peer reviewed articles yet. Because we discuss such possibility just one month. That's why I call you to let others know about the project (from this group of users as well as all from Doc James group of users who were discussing the idea of the project. It would be nice if you call others to join the project. As I noticed above it is one of the important steps to have more users involved to WikiJournal idea to obtain the status of Mediawiki sister project. So get involved and register you account at Wikijournal.org
  3. The history tab is available for registered users actually. Technically it is available for all (if you have a direct URL to history page). Anyway it is not the problem to turn it on for all.
  4. That's great! Have you done something practical to develop the idea? Anyway I offer to join the project now at wikijournal.org and keep moving on.

Diptanshu.D, just for escaping misunderstanding. I don't mind at all to change Wikijournal hosting to Wikimedia servers once Wikijournal become a sister project. Of course in this case the project will have all necessary technical and other support. But you did understand me wrong - I wanted to let you know that it is a not good idea to change hosting right now that was provided to Mikael Häggström and paid by him (as you noticed in some message) as I understood.

So summarizing all above I suggest to fill the following table with points that are necessary to make to realize the idea at wikijournal.org and so that other can see what was done and what should be done:

Necessary steps to implement at Wikijournal.org
To change the License from CC BY SA NC license to open license  Y Done
Feel free to add necessary steps to implement fot Wikijournal.org

Keep in touch! --Fokebox (discusscontribs) 12:50, 19 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

That's great! Have you done something practical to develop the idea?
Philip: Developing something takes commitment. We had not tried to develop a journal till we could show our commitment to quality. We maintain that. On the contrary, although you have embraced the term, you have not bothered to make your project at wikijournal.org adhere to standards of a journal till date. I have to be harsh to state that you have been simply abusing the term WikiJournal. Had you lived upto its name, we would have been happy to contribute. So, other than the domain that you have registered, I do not think that you have anything that you could offer to us through your project. So, we find no reason to contribute to your project unless you choose to adhere to quality standards / peer review. The choice is yours. Diptanshu.D (discusscontribs) 15:47, 19 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Diptanshu.D thank you for the opinion. I understand your position, but I would rather like to get the solution or offer what can be done from my side, but not just a message about current non-quality content at wikijournal.org that stops merging and using wikijournal.org according the discussed its principles and idea--Fokebox (discusscontribs) 16:05, 19 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

Integration of content from wikijournal.org

I agree with the points made by Diptanshu.D and Doc James above. Philip, after discussing this with other WikiJournal User Group, we are not prepared to make an outright merge, since there are obvious differences with the aims of these projects. We are not prepared to make any exception for the aim of having peer review for journals in the group. With merely editorial review, the project would essentially add almost nothing to the world, since there are already Wikipedia articles with protection, with the "editors" practically being those who discuss the content of such protected pages at each WikiProject, such as WikiProject Medicine. I'd rather see users contributing to Wikipedia articles than putting effort on non-peer reviewed journals. Also, as mentioned we have several options for domain name and technical hosting when we feel we are ready to push for a Future as separate Wikimedia project. Still, Philip, you are very welcome to join the project and help build for example the WikiJournal of Science or a new title of your liking. It is possible to integrate articles of yours from your project, but it's important that they have a clear statement for each article without independent peer review that these are drafts yet to be peer reviewed. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 14:56, 19 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

Philip: After an internal discussion Mikael has already informed you of our decision. If you want to transfer your contents to ours, you would need to meet the quality standards, be it now or in the future. There can be no deviation from this. I do not suppose that you should be concerned about when our project becomes a Wikimedia sister project. Please note that Wikimedia is the Foundation that runs projects like Wikipedia whereas Mediawiki is the software it uses. These two are entirely different entities and please do not confuse between those two.
As Mikael has pointed out, you are still welcome to put your inputs into our projects. But quality standards would remain a pre-requisite. Diptanshu.D (discusscontribs) 15:26, 19 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Hi, Mikael, Diptanshu.D! I don't see "obvious differences with the aims of these projects" ... There are only few articles in English WikiJournal (that can be easily archived and marked as non-reviewed articles ... or even deleted until it meets requirements) ... and that't it. At least English WikiJournal is completely ready to realize idea of the journal according to Wikimedia principles and mission. As for Russian edition (because it has the most number of articles) I can just do the same with articles. So I don't see any obstacles the join Wikijournal.org and use it as peer-reviewed journal. I can't understand what can be done else from my side!!! If you decided to develop WikiJournal under another name or whatever. Well, it is just your decision. Just let me know if we work together on the project and its idea or not. If you still insist all published articles at wikijournal.org to fulfill the requirements on its quality and be peer-reviewed. Well, i don't mind ... but it will take time, may be 1-2 years ... I don't know. --Fokebox (discusscontribs) 16:08, 19 March 2017‎ (UTC)Reply
Dear Philip: differences, if any, can be settled if we are willing. I assume that we are. But commitment to quality remains an issue. I would hope that you would think alike. We were skeptical particularly due to three reasons. Firstly, the humongous grant amount made it sound fishy, especially because it was done prior to community involvement. Secondly, your reservation about the peer-review system acted as a barrier. Thirdly, we cannot set up two parallel systems. If we are to merge, wikijournal.org has to be integrated into the same system on which rest of the Wikimedia projects reside. Your reservation about this was another major factor. If you are willing to resolve these I do not see any major problems. You have already shown solidarity by making the licenses compatible. Your tone sounds friendly and we would like to be friendly as well. If you are ready to donate your domain to WMF and if you are ready to embrace the peer-review culture, I do not think that there is any major issue.
I respect all the efforts you have put in so far. But your efforts have been more in the lines of a magazine. I am certain that you would like to improve upon it if there is a chance. All over the world journals are known to be more reliable and authentic than magazines since they adhere to quality control and peer review. If are willing to adopt this culture, we can happily get going. The time delay for peer-reviewing the existing contents on English and Russian version should not be an issue. Diptanshu.D (discusscontribs) 01:55, 20 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Dear Diptanshu.D, please be kindly informed on following:
  • Pardon me for including the group to the grant, now I have excluded it as an interested group. And I apply for me personally for further developing the project.
  • I cannot donate the domain and cannot be a volunteer at this point, 'cause there is a personal interest, while creating developing the website.
  • I don't mind the project to be reviewed. As Wikijournal multi-thematic journal some categories are not necessary should be peer-reviewed. The journal is not strictly scientific, academic, but is open for all users who would like to publish an article as a journalist. But at any case all articles should be reviewed and authors can be informed to improve articles on some points. Please also be informed that It is quite difficult procedure to become peer-reviewed journal in Russia (Russian edition of WikiJournal). There are several steps to obtain such status that includes registration of the company, obtaining the status of Mass-media, obtaining the license, obtaining the special status at State authority as a source of peer-reviewed articles. Only after such procedure universities, academics, scientists will be interested in publishing of their peer-reviewed articles, in other case there won't be any interest in publications. (I don't know the same procedure in Europe, the US and other countries.)
  • Wikijournal status remains free, independent, international, multi-thematic and multi-lingual, open access peer reviewed online journal for scholars, journalists and all registered users.
--Fokebox (discusscontribs) 08:41, 20 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Dear Philip: Your idea of journal is different from ours and Mikael has already pointed that the scope and objectives are different. Your idea is actually about a blog or magazine. People can get to form free blogs at a number of locations like blogspot or wordpress. We are not trying to develop a blog or magazine and would not like our contributors to the same. We feel that contributing to Wikipedia is a better idea. We would not accept anything that does not meet the criteria of an academic or scholarly journal. Your idea does not fulfill that criteria. In such a case I wonder what you really have worth offering. Had you offered to donate or sell your domain to Wikimedia that could have opened the scope of a merger. But since you are not open to that option we find no value in your project and therefore are not interested in a merger. After an internal discussion we had anticipated this possibility and hence Mikael had communicated to you. Please note that we can easily do without your domain but are apprehensive that you would be abusing the name WikiJournal. Diptanshu.D (discusscontribs) 09:17, 20 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Diptanshu.D, In this case I can just offer to create subdomain science.wikijournal.org where you can completely publish peer-review articles. And there is significant difference between blogs and journals/magazines--Fokebox (discusscontribs) 10:23, 20 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Dear Philip: I find your proposal unsuitable. If you mean to hand over a subdomain, that seems rather stupid. If you mean to keep the subdomain on your server it remains even more unacceptable. In any case we cannot allow anything devoid of peer-review if we are to be involved. Finally, the purview of our involvement in peer-reviewed journal activity is not limited to science alone. Even history, commerce or journalism related journals would all need to be peer reviewed. There can be no deviation from this. Diptanshu.D (discusscontribs) 17:27, 20 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Dear Diptanshu please note, I don't mind that articles should be peer-reviewed at Wikijournal. But I think it creates barrier for authors to publish some materials. Let's imagine if I publish information on Lens review and how and is it neccessary that such article should be peer-reviewed? --Fokebox (discusscontribs) 18:05, 20 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Dear Philip: Even in case of a lens review, peer review is essential. After the author makes a submission it is the responsibility of the editorial board or peer review coordinators to find subject matter experts in the field. In this case it could be other lens reviewers or photographers or alike (ones who are experienced with lenses). These people need to be invited to read and evaluate the article and to make sure that the facts and presentation are proper. We have a criteria of at least two independent peer reviewers reviewing each article. They may evaluate the article anonymously or under their own name. After going through the article they provide their inputs about how the article could be improved further. These suggestions could be factual or in terms of style of writing. The suggestions could be essential or optional. The author has to act upon the inputs and unless there are any further inputs the article is now considered by the editorial board whether it is fit to be published. So, irrespective of the field or topic, peer review is considered essential in maintaining quality of a journal article as well as the integrity of the journal. Diptanshu.D (discusscontribs) 10:59, 21 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Dear Diptanshu, well I don't mind to have this procedure and to have completely reviewed wikijournal even all my own publshed articles. I confirmed this several times before and still don't understand why you don't want to join/merge articles and what should be done else from my side.--Fokebox (discusscontribs) 13:04, 21 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
I agree with Diptanshu. Philip, you mention several steps to have official status as a peer review journal. Being registered and indexed among scholarly journals does indeed give the journal additional recognition and credibility, but is it not a pre-requisite to run it. Rather, it can be done gradually as the journal grows.
You do indeed deserve recognition for the personal investment, so if you donate the wikijournal.org domain to Wikimedia, you deserve a mention in its history as the registrant of the domain.
I'm glad that you are willing to have a completely reviewed wikijournal! This is what makes wikijournal unique. Taking an article about the lens for example, there is already a Wikipedia article on that topic which everyone can help writing, and where WikiProject Physics can be regarded as an editorial team that discusses what to include.
I'm now checking with others in the board what would be the next step if we are to merge. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 21:26, 21 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Mikael I think that there isn't need to donate the domain. I can only give technical access to the server to set up or install extension, updates etc. The domain remains under my personal control, but from my side I garantee access to website for all.--Fokebox (discusscontribs) 22:11, 21 March 2017‎ (UTC)Reply
It would need to be donated for the site to become a sister project. As we are looking at becoming a sister project merging with your efforts would not allow that I fear. Doc James (discusscontribs) 09:20, 24 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

I agree the we cannot use the wikijournal.org domain unless it is owned by Wikimedia or by the WikiJournal organization. Philip, the next step you need to take for an integration is that each article that is not peer reviewed must be clearly marked as such. Also, you should change the status of your grant proposal to "withdrawn", but you are still welcome to suggest specific additions for our next grant to Wikimedia Foundation. For example, you mention expenses for "legal organization". However, you need to specify what legal entities you are thinking of registering with, and what their fees are. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 20:53, 25 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

What a merger would look like

There are a few key requirements for the WikiJournal User Group (and consequently wikijournal.org if a merger occurs) in order to be successful:

  1. Become a sister project within the Wikimedia Foundation - This is is a major task and involves satisfying the Sister Projects Committee that the project meets a number of requirements (similar to requirements for thematic organisations). Otherwise it is better to remain a user group / thematic org within the umbrella of the WMF.
    • Wikimedia supportive mission & Thematic mission - Must offer something unique (not covered by other projects). The peer reviewed academic content does this via external expert review. The danger for opinion pieces such as product reports, location reports or how-to guides is that without some form of review they might be more suited for Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, or Wikihow (non WMF).
    • Legal structure - Bylaws need to be developed to ensure clear scope and operations of the project.
    • CC BY-SA (or compatible) licensing - Done for both WikiJournal User Group and wikijournal.org
    • No advertising - Done for both WikiJournal User Group and wikijournal.org
  2. Each journal becomes indexed in appropriate academic locations (e.g. pubmed, PMC, google scholar, medline etc) - This will have to be achieved by each journal separately, whether they are medicine, humanities, science or otherwise. It relies on output of quality-assured contents and adherence to strict standards.

Possible bylaws solution

  1. Draft official bylaws for how the journal publishing group would operate (WikiJournal_User_Group/Draft bylaws). I would recommend using the WikiJournal of Medicine/Bylaws as a starting point as currently our most advanced attempt at such a system. This has the add benefit of us laying out in a single document the mission, vision and organisation of the project.

Possible non-peer reviewed content solutions

  1. 'Clean slate' (Like WikiJournal of Science). When the second journal of science was slowly converted into the WikiJournal of Science, previous articles that had not been reviewed were archived (the 'zeroth' issue) and added to the list of articles to be peer reviewed. If they pass peer review, then they would be added to one of the subsequent issues of the WikiJournal of Science.
  2. 'Preprint server' (Like arxiv.org). A specific section of the site where articles that are not yet peer reviewed are kept. This section would make no assertion of accuracy for contents. This would be the same as Category:Pre-prints_not_yet_included_in_WikiJournal_of_Medicine.

Possible identity solutions

  1. We need to draft an example 'landing page' so that we have a clear idea of what it may look like. I will put together a draft main page based (somewhat) on www.plos.org.

The above represent only my own thoughts on possible solutions, but others are free to suggest alternatives that I've not thought of! All of these things need to be addressed regardless of what specific domain ends up being used or whether a merger goes ahead. Having these draft documents will help us to all be clearer about what we intend (to fully avoid any possible misunderstandings) and if any clashes remain. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 07:42, 22 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

@Evolution and evolvability: have you considered asking for a test wiki at Phabricator? That would enable us to start drafting pages inside a wiki-environment to mimic what it might look like when it moves to a full wiki. Green Giant (discusscontribs) 20:49, 16 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
Regarding non-peer reviewed content, I think we can continue to haft a Draft: namespace within the same wiki. The most important is that they are clearly marked as drafts. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 11:17, 26 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

Centralisation for WikiJournal User Group discussion

We currently have discussions about the WikiJournal project across three locations:

Since the 'formal' WikiJournal User Group page is at Meta:Talk:WikiJournal User Group, I think that we should move centralised discussion from here to there to be in line with other user groups. If people agree I'll merge the current talk page contents and archives into Meta:Talk:WikiJournal User Group, redirected from the other pages.
T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 04:45, 4 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

I think it is important to centralize the discussion, but I prefer this to be the location. I don't visit my watchlist at the Meta wiki very often, so it might take a week before I notice there's any new talk page entry there. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 07:57, 4 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
agree w/ Mikael Häggström --Ozzie10aaaa (discusscontribs) 13:26, 4 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
I think that discussion about the general WikiJournal project should take place at Meta, and discussion about the English WikiJournals should remain here (until we migrate to wikijournal.org). --Felipe (discusscontribs) 16:03, 5 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
I think that Meta is the right place. However, as of now (till the migration to wikijournal.org is complete) the ongoing discussions can remain here. Diptanshu.D (discusscontribs) 18:58, 5 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

That's fine by me. A proper cross-wiki watchlist can't come soon enough! I'll redirect everything here for now. We can revisit the issue later in the year. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 10:50, 6 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

I've replaced the other talk pages with redirects here. I've also moved the old Wikiversity:Talk:WikiJournal/Future as separate Wikimedia project to an archive of this page, since it's a more sensible location. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 11:14, 6 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
I've done a few renames (basically renamed WikiJournal/WikiJournal User Group to WikiJournal User Group). The redundancy seemed useless, ugly and confusing. I hope you'll all agree it's better now. In any case, we're on the path to migration so it'd be temporary, but it's nice to know that we only have three main pages now, and they are named more or less consistently: WikiJournal User Group, meta:WikiJournal User Group and meta:WikiJournal. Also, the WikiJournal page can now be devoted to the generalist journal proposed here (when and if consensus is achieved). --Felipe (discusscontribs) 20:05, 15 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Good work. I've also added a top banner so that new readers can more easily find the main discussion pages of relevance. It's a bit of a visual clash with the Wiki.J.Med discussion page but will do for now. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 11:49, 22 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

Wikiversity Main Page Section

It seems to me that while WikiJournal is at Wikiversity, it should be highlighted with a Wikiversity:Main Page entry or block. Any thoughts from the user group? -- Dave Braunschweig (discusscontribs) 17:39, 22 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

I would support this. I think it would be ideal to highlight both the WikiJournal User Group page, and WikiJournal of Medicine. One of the main challenges for the expansion to additional topics (e.g. making an issue 1 of WikiJournal of Science will be promoting the existence of the journals to attract submissions. Where in the main page do you thin would be appropriate? T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 23:24, 22 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
There are several options. We could add Journals in the upper right topics box. We could shorten news. We could shrink the heading and daily quote. For me, the current Community box is wasted space and could be replaced, or combined with Development. I'd say be bold. We should also redesign with mobile in mind. The current Main Page mobile view is extremely disappointing. -- Dave Braunschweig (discusscontribs) 01:46, 23 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
I think the right topics box seems like a very good spot (I assume it's the one titled "Explore Wikiversity"), with a WikiJournal or WikiJournals list entry which shows the included journals when expanded. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 05:37, 25 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
I made some sandbox edits of how Template:Portal Nav 0.5 would look like with the addition of
<categorytree mode="all" depth="0" namespaces="WikiJournal">WikiJournals</categorytree>
, but it renders as:
, without any expandable options. Does anyone know how to get it to work? Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 11:32, 26 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Currently, you would need to use:
<categorytree mode="all" depth="0" namespaces="WikiJournal">WikiJournal</categorytree>
Category:WikiJournals is empty. If you decide the category should be WikiJournals, let me know. I have bot code that can rename categories and edit all of the member pages. -- Dave Braunschweig (discusscontribs) 13:42, 26 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Also, it's actually the following, because there isn't a separate namespace for WikiJournals:
<categorytree mode="all" depth="0">WikiJournal</categorytree>
Dave Braunschweig (discusscontribs) 13:47, 26 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
Thanks, Dave Braunschweig, for clarification! For now, I think the expandable menu should show
- WikiJournal of Medicine
- WikiJournal of Science
Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 12:43, 28 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

 Y Done - You'll need to monitor the Category:WikiJournal category. If something is added to the category, it appears in the expandable menu. -- Dave Braunschweig (discusscontribs) 13:14, 28 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

Thanks! Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 04:45, 31 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

WikiJournal or WikiJournals

Now that we are about to make the overall organization a formal one, we need to decide whether it should be named WikiJournal or WikiJournals. This was not really brought up during the name election. I hope we can simply form consensus about it here, but if necessary we may need to make a vote about it. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 11:50, 26 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

  • I support WikiJournals, because it reflects the fact that it's an organization based on multiple journals, with separate subjects and administrations. When we make it an official organization, that s helps to distinguish it from the editorial boards and bylaws etc of individual member journals. If we didn't have that s, we would need more complicated structures for distinction, such as the WikiJournal Umbrella Organization or the WikiJournal Union. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 11:50, 26 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
  • I support WikiJournal. It stands as a generic term and a composite should probably be a singular entity. Nevertheless, when referring to a number of them in the catergory, we can use the term WikiJournas at places where applicable. There are two entities to consider. The first entity, the output essentially is a WikiJournal. The second entity is the group of people behind, may be the publisher, governing body or something of that sort who run the show and with whom transactions (not necessarily monetary) can be made. We can have WikiJournal Council, WikiJournal Publishing Group and WikiJournals Guild as prospective names for the governing body. But I am willing to listen to what others might have to say. Diptanshu.D (discusscontribs) 12:13, 26 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
singular form is best--Ozzie10aaaa (discusscontribs) 12:03, 27 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
The WMF sister projects mostly use singular (but wikibooks is already an exception), so I think either will be fine. For trademarks, it might be best to register both? Even for e.g. the overarching organisation board/council/committee, either the WikiJournal editorial board / WikiJournals editorial board would work. I suspect for actual operations we will need several longer titles to refer to the different facets (e.g the group of journals, the users generally interested, the overarching editorial board etc) as Diptanshu mentioned. I think that these operational names should be decide with reference to how other journals structure themselves where possible. Examples include www.nature.com/npg and PeerJ.com. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 01:44, 28 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
I'm now convinced WikiJournal is the optimal official name. It doesn't exclude usage of several variants as mentioned. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 12:44, 28 March 2017 (UTC)Reply


Pillars

Also, we need to define the most important "pillars" of WikiJournal(s), which we should require all journals to fulfill. I think the most important ones are:

  • No cost for authors to have their works published
  • Peer review of all articles before publication
  • Editability directly online, by anyone, but changes to the meaning of any text or media generally needs a new peer review
  • Transparency, with peer reviews and article discussions being open for everyone
  • Open access for readers, without any cost
  • Copy allowance, with freedom for anyone to copy and redistribute published material

Feel free to comment and/or rephrase. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 19:32, 26 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

Transparency

I prefer that we require WikiJournals to have peer reviews publicly visible. Yet, the peer reviewers themselves may remain anonymous. However, the biggest disadvantage is that it may scare off potential peer reviewers. Advantages include the possibility for readers to see how the article has improved. It also provides verifiability of the peer review process, and if a reader finds questionable content in the article, that reader can check whether that content was commented on in the peer review. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 19:32, 26 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

Allowing reviewers to be anonymous should be adequate compromise for reviewers to feel comfortable being as critical as necessary. Indeed wikis are very good for creating anonymous/pseudonymous user accounts. We could even generate user accounts with random 10-digit names and assign them to reviewers who wish to be anonymous, e.g User:reviewer_1957280988. The benefit of the transparency outweighs the risk of scaring off reviewers. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 01:42, 27 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
I think reviews should be done by registered Wikimedia accounts but there are some limitations. The user doesn't have to use their real name (as you can guess by my username) but I am concerned that some usernames might not seem as "respectable" e.g. would the wider world be happy with a review carried out by someone called "Green Giant"? On the flipside I would disagree with any reviewing done by anonymous IPs simply because of the long term vandalism I've noted on Wikipedia and other wikis. I'm not against general editing by anon IPs (some of whom are fantastic) but I think the danger of vandalism diverts time and resources. I'm guessing that once an article had been reviewed and promoted, it would be locked from general editing (except for spelling errors etc)? Green Giant (discusscontribs) 20:34, 16 April 2017 (UTC)Reply

Copy allowance

I think it would be best if our default license was CC-BY, except for cases of using existing Wikipedia content (CC-BY-SA) or authors request. The CC-BY license allows a lot more flexibility and compatibility for reuse, and is far more common in academic publishing. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 01:44, 27 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

I agree with this. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 18:58, 31 March 2017 (UTC)Reply
This has now been implemented. All previous publications retain their existing license, however subsequent publications will be CC-BY by default unless the author requests otherwise or they re-use CC-BY-SA content. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 01:37, 10 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
When you talk of CC-BY, I'm assuming you mean the latest version, but can I suggest that there should also be an option to allow dual-licensing with CC-BY-All and GFDL? That would give the maximum freedom to readers, short of putting it in the public domain, which should also be an option for authors? I agree with the comment about CC-BY being widely used but I don't think journal articles should be limited to just one copyright option. Green Giant (discusscontribs) 20:23, 16 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
Sorry, Green Giant, for not spotting this entry of yours earlier. Authors do have the option to choose any Wikipedia-compatible license. It's worth to mention that multi-licensing would be permitted as well (as long as it includes compatible licenses), and I added this at our publishing guidelines [6]. I don't think it's necessary to recommend multi-licensing with CC-BY and GFDL by default. The terms of the GFDL are not as straightforward as that the CC-BY 4.0 terms, so it might present unnecessary confusion for authors who are not familiar with licensing. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 14:27, 8 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

Non-free content

Another couple of issues I wanted to raise are to do with images (as Commons is where my largest number of edits takes place). I'm guessing that nobody wants to write purely text articles so Commons files will probably be permitted but what about non-free images? I don't have examples to hand but what about images that are free in the US but not in other countries - would they be forbidden? If not, is it too early to raise the question of an exemption doctrine policy (which the WMF requires of any wiki hosting non-free media)? Would it be too restrictive to insist on free media only? Sorry for a flurry of questions. Green Giant (discusscontribs) 20:41, 16 April 2017 (UTC)Reply

An answer for say WikiJournal of Science is to ask permission for use of an image. The source or creator may agree as long as certain conditions are specifically stated with the image. This is common when publishing book chapters or conference proceedings, for example. --Marshallsumter (discusscontribs) 21:51, 16 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
As for now, I'd say that we do not host any non-free media. We could possibly implement something similar to the Wikipedia Non-free content policy, but I rather think authors should only use their own work or explicitly free content. After all, a major purpose of WikiJournal is to attract free content, so I don't think authors should have the option to retain non-free licensing. When publishing Wikipedia content, the license and creators of the images should be displayed in the article, and it would be rather complicated to display non-free content as such.
Still, if the situation arises, we might re-evaluate this later. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 14:47, 8 May 2017 (UTC)Reply


Adoption of bylaws

I've made a draft of bylaws at WikiJournal_User_Group/Draft_bylaws, incorporating the pillars above. Please make any comments about the content soon, so we can subsequently go ahead and form consensus on adopt them. After that, we can elect the board. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 17:28, 9 April 2017 (UTC)Reply

Thanks Mikael for drafting the bylaws. I have taken the liberty to rephrase the Article I paragraph. I would insist you to reconsider whether two terms, one for the journal and one for the governing body or organisation should be used. I suggest the use of two terms. You have already used the former term (WikiJournal Board) in the terminology. Apart from WikiJournal Board, the terms WikiJournal Council or WikiJournal Guild could be considered. In addition to this, I think that Article III requires expansion. The scope of inclusion under Wikimedia needs to be mentioned and defined. Diptanshu💬 17:50, 9 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
I would prefer avoiding the term WikiJournal Board as each of the WikiJournals would have a respective board. So, it is perhaps better to avoid an unnecessary confusion between the two. Furthermore, the procedure for application for inclusion of a new journal needs to be concretely defined. The minimum number of interested contributors, the approach and things like that should be defined. The application process could be made a two stage process where in the second stage the WikiJournal governing body sets checkpoints to be fulfilled before a green signal can be given. The scope of incubation and mentorship or guidance of the new enthusiasts by the board members of the existing journals (at that point of time) should also be mentioned. I think that this obligation should be there. Diptanshu💬 18:08, 9 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
Although we at Wiki.J.Med mediate the activities through a closed google group, I think that the WikiJournal governing body or each of the boards for each of the journals should have an individual mailing list, the participation in which would be limited to the board members. This will ensure that the communications are archived on Wikimedia servers and full transparency would be maintained. Diptanshu💬 18:13, 9 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
Thanks Mikael for making the amends. The following improvisations come to my mind:
  • Article III needs to be expanded. Subsections need to be introduced.
  • The procedure for applying for formation of a new journal in this group.
  • Choice of subject, non-overlapping nature preferred.
  • Minimum number of interested participants willing to start and work upon the journal.
  • The procedure of formation of an independent board for the respective journal.
  • Board members would have to reveal their real names and credentials.
  • Dedication of members to open knowledge and open access movement.
  • An initial period wherein the WikiJournal Council will oversee the activities of the respective WikiJournal Board.
  • That one or more members of the respective WikiJournal Board can apply to join the WikiJournal Council in order to form a representation of the respective WikiJournal in the Council. Acceptance of these new members into the Council will be subject to voting by existing Council members.
  • The respective WikiJournal Board needs to form of list of standard norms that benchmark journals for the respective subject usually adopt, and gradually the journal would have to try to achieve those standards.
  • Article publication process (briefly) from submission, peer review to final publication.
  • A minimum of two peer reviews as a pre-requisite for each article.
  • Amenities conferred by WikiJournal umbrella vs. amenities to be procured by the respective journal.
  • Stuff like Permalinks (DOI), ISSN and basic registrations.
Will update the list if I can think of anything else. Diptanshu💬 19:03, 16 April 2017 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for your comments, Diptanshu! As you noticed, I thought WikiJournal Council fits better than WikiJournal Board, largely because it avoids mixup with the editorial boards of individual journals. I also added that journals not yet having been accepted should use the word "Preliminary" or equivalent in their titles. Beyond this and the core criteria for candidate journals, I don't think we should have any further strict criteria. After all, not even WikiJournal of Science fulfills those core criteria since its peer review system is currently labeled as "intended". I've rather took the time to update the page WikiJournal User Group/Starting a journal. We can use this as a form of grading of the development of different journals.
I haven't yet gone through your recently added list, but that will be my next step. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 20:01, 16 April 2017 (UTC)Reply

I've now made some further amendments with your comments in mind (but not yet all of them). I've split members into journal representatives and community-selected members. Also, I've added specifics about how to apply for an additional journal at WikiJournal User Group/Starting a journal (making an entry here). It doesn't necessarily need to be specified in the Bylaws. Instead, we can easily adapt to whatever issues arise when we actually do get such an application. If a particular issue arises that we hadn't thought of, we can vote to change the Bylaws later. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 19:56, 17 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
I've made some more amendments now. Notably, in its current format, the "overall board" will retain the title WikiJournal Council in order to avoid mix-up with editorial boards. Also, it will consist of both representatives of each journal as well as community-elected members.
Regarding the acceptance of new journals, the currents draft states that journals not yet accepted by the Council should have "Preliminary WikiJournal of.." as the title. At the same time, such title probably discourages potential authors to submit their works, so I think I don't think we should have any strict criteria beyond those given in the suggested bylaws when considering accepting new journals. Instead, I've expanded the page WikiJournal_User_Group/Starting_a_journal to give a recommendation about the steps, and in which order they may be done. After all, even those criteria in the bylaws would require WikiJournal of Science to officially require peer review for all articles, or have its name changed to "Preliminary WikiJournal of Science". We can always choose to remove a journal if it seems to move in the wrong direction.
Also, to facilitate in the creation of new journals, I have the idea that we could have an entire "template journal", with all the basic pages necessary, so that those wanting to create a new title can start off quite fast by just adding the name of the subject. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 19:12, 24 April 2017 (UTC)Reply

Consensus / vote

The consensus has been all supportive of the current format of the Bylaws, so I've now ratified them by removing the "Draft" prefix for that page. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 13:56, 8 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

Outcome: Ratified. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 13:56, 8 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

Do we feel that we can adopt these Bylaws in their current format? Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 19:12, 24 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
I made it a bit stricter by adding "A public notice must be made at least 10 days at the talk page of the main page of WikiJournal before such resolution" so that any participant can dispute such a transaction. As such, I think the risk of abuse of this system is minimized. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 19:00, 1 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

Expansion possibilities?

So we have a journal for medicine and one for science. Is there room for more journals or will it remain two until the project is hived off? There are several potential non-scientific areas that other journals could cover such as history, education and law. What would be needed to request additional journals? Cheers. Green Giant (discusscontribs) 21:11, 16 April 2017 (UTC)Reply

It's interesting that you brought this up, Green Giant, as we are discussing the criteria for additional journals. You can read about suggested steps at WikiJournal User Group/Starting a journal. As mentioned, the specific criteria to be an accepted member of WikiJournal is still under discussion. Is there any particular subject that would be of interest to you? Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 18:56, 17 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
@Mikael Häggström: thank you pointing me to the link. My interests have varied over the years but I would be particularly interested in a WikiJournal of Law. Green Giant (discusscontribs) 19:00, 17 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
@Green Giant: I think it is the general hope of the existing WikiJournals that the format can be extended to other areas. Currently, WikiJournal of Medicine is the largest 'flagship' journal. WikiJournal of Science is just starting up. A test page for WikiJournal of Business and Economics was also created by user:Michael Ten back in February. In general, I think that larger topic areas will be more sustainable initially (e.g. a WikiJournal of Humanities), since it is more likely to be able to sustain and publish multiple articles per year. It is likely that Wiki.J.Sci will aim to encompass biology, physics, mathematics, engineering etc. What do you think about a WikiJournal of Humanities that encompassed law, economics, politics and other humanities? See this draft 'main page' for en example of what I mean. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 01:15, 18 April 2017 (UTC)Reply
@Evolution and evolvability: that sounds like an eminently sensible approach. A humanities journal would be very suitable. Green Giant (discusscontribs) 01:28, 18 April 2017 (UTC)Reply


A whacky idea: How the WikiJournal can "break out" into the mainstream

I have been struggling to find a compelling reason why others might be interested in WikiJournals hosted by wikimedia. I need write such an article to keep my dean happy, and find myself going to Wikipedia whenever I need info. Then, I artificially create a track to refereed journals so everything looks proper. What if authors of the top journals could go to a "refereed" WikiJournal that contained a "checked" Wikipedia article?

I realize that this is not really a path out of this group's obscurity. But if we could identify well-known and established publishers of journals, maybe one or two of them might try referencing a Wikipedia article. There are a number of established scientists quietly contributing to Wikipedia, and it would not be too difficult to convince them to "check" a given permalink to a Wikipedia article, if there was a good reason to do this. This idea would take a lot more publicity than I could possibly generate. But what I like about this plan is that it is modest. I am proposing that the WikiJournal of Science be a "special-purpose" journal in which scholars who rely on Wikipedia for general information cooperate to make such use of Wikipedia more reliable. It's one of those cultural changes that might happen if only there was a way to initiate it.

I am currently working on an article that requires an understanding of w:Sample space, w:Outcome (probability),w:Event_(probability_theory), and w:Elementary event. If I knew any of the editors there, I would ask them to create a WikiJournal article for me to reference.--Guy vandegrift (discusscontribs) 03:47, 7 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

Hi Guy!
Do I understand it correctly that you want to reach out to potential authors, who want to submit Wikipedia articles for the sake of using them as references in their own works? I think it sounds like a good idea. Going through the edit histories of such articles may indeed be useful in finding such potential authors.
Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 13:42, 8 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

WikiJournal Council

I think it's in accordance with the now ratified Bylaws that the initial WikiJournal Council simply includes those who were therein before: Meta:WikiJournal_User_Group#WikiJournal_Council. Feel free to comment if you feel concern about the inclusion of any current member of the council, including yourself, or if you want to join. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 15:19, 8 May 2017 (UTC)Reply


Membership in the WikiJournal Council

I am interested in being a member of the WikiJournal Council! --Marshallsumter (discusscontribs) 21:57, 8 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

Dear Marshallsumter: You can introduce yourself (real identity) with details of your education, profession, passion, wiki-experience as well as why you want to be a part of the WikiJournal Council. Diptanshu💬 13:15, 10 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
At present, until the matter on Wikipedia has been resolved, I prefer to remain Marshallsumter. I have a pdf I submit with proposals which can meet your request, but I must ask you respect my request to remain Marshallsumter. If you agree to this and each other committee member agrees, respectively, send me an email from here and I'll send you an email from my official email account. --Marshallsumter (discusscontribs) 00:05, 11 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
I'm glad to hear your interest in joining, Marshallsumter! Displaying your real identity is not a requirement to join WikiJournal Council (although this can be discussed, and it's a requirement to join the editorial board of WikiJournal of Medicine). The bylaws relating to WikiJournal Council were ratified just a couple of days ago, so this discussion will likely involve possible amendments thereof as well. I now therefore split this section into "Membership of Marshallsumter" and "General requirements". Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 08:32, 12 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
Dear Marshallsumter, we respect your wish not to reveal your real name and the same can definitely be maintained. However, in contrast to Wikipedia where anyone with unverified credentials can edit, at WikiJournal credentials need to be produced. This is important for members of WikiJournal Council in order to ensure that apart from the willingness to contribute they have a sound understanding of scientific thought and how a journal works. Although your edits reveal your calibre it is still important to formally reveal the details of your education, profession, passion, wiki-experience as well as why you want to be a part of the WikiJournal Council. If you do not wish to do it publicly you can send an email to Mikael and we can discuss internally thereafter. We assure you that confidentiality would be maintained and your identity would not be made public. All this is important because we want to maintain the standards and the same would also be essential when we seek formal membership of suitable international bodies. I hope you understand. Diptanshu💬 13:50, 12 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
Thanks Marshallsumter for sending your CV. It is being reviewed internally. However, we would request you to write a short intro on a) your specific on-wiki experience and priorities, and b) relevant off-wiki experience. Diptanshu💬 14:58, 14 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

Hopefully the following will be helpful:

On-wiki experiences: I have edited Wikipedia since 8 October 2008, WikiDoc since 19 February 2009 and Wikiversity since 5 September 2009, but primarily since August 2011.

Priorities: as it states on my user page - X-ray astronomy and the human genome. But I have extensive experience in materials chemistry and physics as well as advanced mathematics and theory. On Wikipedia I was endeavoring to bring articles including those I created to the state of the art or science so that I could conduct original research & product development offline. On Wikidoc I have contributed basic science and human genetics to help understand illnesses. On Wikiversity I continue to do what I've mentioned on Wikipedia and conduct original research when it belongs available to the public. I continue to submit proposals for grants and perform research that may be publishable as I have done since I was in graduate school (1973-4), for the University of Chicago (ANL), the Office of Naval Research (NRL), and others such as NASA (last year). I perform Custodial duties here and review for WikiJournal of Science, as I have refereed for the Journal of Applied Physics, Applied Physics Letters, Journal of Materials Research, and the Journal of Electronic Materials. I'm not a lawyer or an attorney, but I can read successfully the legal journals and have more than 3 years of active court room experience on both sides of the bench at the federal level (patent interferences, administrative proceedings, hearings in district courts). Here fair use of images and text is a priority. I hope this helps. If you want to see most of my publications, perform an advanced Google scholar search using my initials and last name in quotes. The biology and psychology articles are not mine. --Marshallsumter (discusscontribs) 01:40, 16 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

Generally, my interests in joining the Council are focused on the common interests of the journals at Wikiversity and involvement with the creation and/or acceptance of additional journals in this group. Primary concern is getting the Wikijournal of Science on its way to publishing high quality, open access, peer-reviewed articles. --Marshallsumter (discusscontribs) 05:18, 25 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

Membership of Marshallsumter

As far as I've sen here, Marshallsumter has a good track record in Wikiversity. The identity issue needs to be discussed further in the separate section I now start below. I did, however, have to lookup Wikipedia history as well, where there's an indefinite ban secondary to this discussion: Administrators' noticeboard - User:Marshallsumter disrupting Wikipedia for "research" purposes. That was back in 2011, and I haven't read the discussion in detail. In any case, I agree with Diptanshu that it's appropriate that you write a bit about your education, profession, passion, wiki-experience as well as why you want to be a part of the WikiJournal Council. Just a short description would be very useful. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 08:32, 12 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

I'm on ResearchGate and LinkedIn but could not find how to connect to Mikael Häggström on LinkedIn. --Marshallsumter (discusscontribs) 14:30, 12 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

My LinkedIn profile is located at [7]. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 18:37, 12 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

Vote

Thank you for your support! Regarding using the Template:Research, please see Research namespace. I removed the template when it appeared this would pass for the reasons indicated there. --Marshallsumter (discusscontribs) 22:17, 19 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
Since we have unanimous support, I've now added you to the WikiJournal Council, Marshallsumter. Welcome! I recommend that we all make a short presentation about ourselves there, as I've done for myself [8]. Also, please keep yourself updated about what is happening by adding this page to your watchlist if you haven't done so already, and subscribe to the public mailing list at https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikijournal-en. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 15:47, 25 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

General requirements

Regarding identity, I'm not sure a publicly displayed identity would be necessary. I do think, however, candidates for WikiJournal Council must have her/his identity verified in order to avoid the risk of sock puppetry. The easiest way would be to have a private email list for council members, to which prospective candidates simply send an email about who they really are. It should also point to a personal webpage, which should not be easy to make a mock-up of. This requirement would in turn require all council members to comply with a confidentiality rule, such as "WikiJournal Council members should not disclose the identities of pseudonymous participants of WikiJournal". Still, the identities of project participants may incidentally be revealed to the council, so I think all council members should agree to such a confidentially rule anyways. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 08:32, 12 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

WikiJournal Council email

We currently have an email list for WikiJournal where everyone may subscribe. I think we should have a separate confidential email for the WikiJournal Council, similarly to what is used by the editorial board of WikiJournal of Medicine in addition to its open-for-everyone email list. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 08:45, 12 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

Need to encourage scholars to cite a particular revision of a WikiJournal article

I just discovered the WikiJournal project, and I find it very interesting. I do have at least one concern that I would like to share, and I have not been able to find a discussion of this concern in the archives of this talk page. (By the way, if it is possible to add a search box to search the archives of this talk page, please add one.)

The concern is that there may be a need to encourage scholars to cite a particular revision of a WikiJournal article. I have noticed that when scholars cite Wikipedia articles, they often cite the basic URL of an article (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebellum) and not a permanent link to the particular revision of the article that they are referencing (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cerebellum&oldid=780727896 is the current revision of Cerebellum as I am writing this). This is a major problem, because when a reader of a scholarly work visits the cited basic URL (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebellum), the reader is likely not viewing the revision that the scholar cited. Would not the same problem occur if a scholar were to cite the following WikiJournal article in the following way?

The above citation follows the "suggested citation format" in the WikiJournal of Medicine, but it appears to be just as problematic as the links to basic URLs on Wikipedia that I described above: when a reader visits this DOI or URL, the reader is likely not viewing the revision that the scholar cited. The "suggested citation format" is not encouraging scholars to cite a particular revision of a WikiJournal article. Is there not a need to encourage scholars to cite a particular revision of a WikiJournal article? Biogeographist (discusscontribs) 17:16, 21 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

Thank you for your interest! Here's one possible approach: "The ionosphere is a shell of electrons and electrically charged atoms and molecules that surrounds the Earth, stretching from a height of about 50 km to more than 1000 km. It owes its existence primarily to ultraviolet radiation from the Sun."[1] What do you think? The reference states the date of the Wikipedia article and the access date. --Marshallsumter (discusscontribs) 18:37, 21 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
@Marshallsumter: Thanks for your response! But you just cited Wikipedia—what does that have to do with WikiJournal? We are discussing the WikiJournal project here. If you were trying to suggest that scholars should include the access date when citing a WikiJournal article, I do not think that is sufficient because it is unlikely that the reader would know the difference between a regular journal and a WikiJournal; the reader would likely not know how to access the correct revision of the article from the article's history page. That is one reason why I am suggesting that there may be a need to encourage scholars to cite a particular revision of a WikiJournal article using a permanent link (e.g., https://en.wikiversity.org/w/index.php?title=WikiJournal_of_Medicine/The_Cerebellum&oldid=1636733 is the current revision of WikiJournal of Medicine/The Cerebellum as I am writing this), and NOT the basic URL and DOI in the "suggested citation format" in the WikiJournal of Medicine. Merely using the basic URL and DOI in the "suggested citation format" in the WikiJournal of Medicine treats a WikiJournal article as if it were a traditional journal article; but unlike a traditional journal article, WikiJournal articles can change over time, which would cause the problem that I mentioned above if a scholar cites only the basic URL or DOI. Biogeographist (discusscontribs) 19:06, 21 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
Yes, I agree with Biogeographist. The worst way is to cite the Wikipedia page, since that is unstable. The best would be to cite a version of the journal that was "checked" by referees of known credentials, essentially elevating the Wikipedia article to that which has passed peer review. I agree that a poor second choice is to reference it to a version that has been upgraded after it has passed peer review. When you reference something you need the analogy of an art Povenance. To summarize all this: the worst way is this: wikipedia:Provenance; slightly better is: w:Special:Permalink/771759278. But even the permalink is flawed because I myself don't really know the definition (I was just trusting that the Wikipedia article was correct).--Guy vandegrift (discusscontribs) 21:00, 21 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
@Guy vandegrift: Thanks for the comment! It could be a poor choice to cite (as you said) "a version that has been upgraded after it has passed peer review", or a scholar may have a good reason for citing a later version, but in any case it seems important that the WikiJournal project encourage scholars to cite a particular revision of a WikiJournal article. You have used wiki markup in your example (e.g., [[Special:Permalink/1636733]]), but, of course, if a scholar were citing a WikiJournal article outside of the Wikimedia platform, the scholar would have to use a full permalink URL, e.g., https://en.wikiversity.org/w/index.php?title=WikiJournal_of_Medicine/The_Cerebellum&oldid=1636733 for WikiJournal of Medicine/The Cerebellum. Many scholars may not know that they need to cite a WikiJournal article this way, so I suggest that it be highlighted in the "suggested citation format" of a WikiJournal article. Biogeographist (discusscontribs) 21:39, 21 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
The DOI is a pretty sensible way to cite WikiJournal article. If any changes are made to a WikiJournal article (other than cosmetic formatting or uncontroversial typos) it should be re-peer-reviewed and assigned a new DOI (as is done in other academic journals). A DOI. We can also implement CrossMark verification for minor changes (example in PLOS). If in 2 years time there have been sufficient new discoveries to publish a new version of Cerebellum, it would be re-reviewed and re-published with a new DOI. The optimal formatting is DOI.[2] However, the left hand side or Wikipedia also offers a "cite this page" option to get the paermalink.[3] Of course, Wikipedia articles that have not been peer reviewed should not be cited. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 06:44, 25 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
Indeed, the DOI codes makes it easier. Once the meaning of an article has been enough changed, we can create a new DOI code for the article (such as the old code with the addition of .2) to be the standard one used in citations. We can then redirect the old DOI code (which would still appear in many external sources) to a separate page that begins with a message saying something like "This article has been significantly updated since its first publication." preferably followed with a summary of the main changes, a link to the latest version, as well as to the History page so that readers may find the particular version at the time of the citation that brought them to the article.
Creation of a new DOI code is quite easy, but I still think we only need to do it to when there are significant changes in the meaning of the article main text, and not for every spelling error or technical edit.
Crossref membership costs WikiJournal of Medicine $275 per year, but there's essentially no fee for each assigned DOI code. I've therefore now sent a message to Crossref, asking whether it's possible to expand our membership to WikiJournal as a whole, just theoretically. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 16:59, 25 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

Thanks to all for the responses. I didn't know that DOIs could and would be updated—that mostly addresses my concern. Biogeographist (discusscontribs) 03:33, 28 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

@Evolution and evolvability: You said: "Of course, Wikipedia articles that have not been peer reviewed should not be cited", and you cited as support an editorial by Lane Rasberry. However, as I read Rasberry's editorial, which contends that "Wikipedia should not be cited as a source of information", I found a telling contradiction and a crucial flaw in his argument. The telling contradiction is that the single study that he cites categorizes some citations of Wikipedia as "appropriate—in other words, categorized as 'citations about Wikipedia' or 'Wikipedia used in methods.'" The idea that some citations of Wikipedia are "appropriate" contradicts his contention that "Wikipedia should not be cited as a source of information" in any scholarly text on any subject. The crucial flaw in his argument can be seen in his final sentence: "Everyone should try to have research practices at least as good as those of the Wikipedians, and they would never cite Wikipedia." But the reason Wikipedians do not cite Wikipedia is because such citation would be a forbidden circular self-reference, and this reason is not relevant to scholars who are citing Wikipedia in their published texts outside of Wikipedia. I agree that Rasberry's message about scientific peer review is important for scientists who are writing for health science journals, but his argument is flawed and moreover, I would argue, his contention that "Wikipedia should not be cited" is not relevant to the wider range of scholars: for example, scholars who write about Wikipedia will certainly have to cite Wikipedia, and since Wikipedia is an increasingly important cultural phenomenon it is likely that more and more historians and other scholars in the social sciences and humanities will have to cite Wikipedia whenever their subject matter involves Wikipedia. Here are some examples of scholarship where citing Wikipedia is certainly appropriate:

  • Elder-Vass, Dave (2016). Profit and gift in the digital economy. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316536421. ISBN 9781107146143. OCLC 946254852. 
  • Safner, Ryan (December 2016). "Institutional entrepreneurship, Wikipedia, and the opportunity of the commons". Journal of Institutional Economics 12 (4): 743–771. doi:10.1017/S1744137416000096. 
  • Edwards, John S., ed (2015). The essentials of knowledge management. OR essentials series. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/9781137552105. ISBN 9781137552082. OCLC 908913998. 
  • Tkacz, Nathaniel (2015). Wikipedia and the politics of openness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226192277. OCLC 881386686. 
  • Vandendorpe, Christian (October 2015). "Wikipedia and the ecosystem of knowledge". Scholarly and Research Communication 6 (3): 1–10. http://www.src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/201. 
  • Fichman, Pnina; Hara, Noriko, eds (2014). Global Wikipedia: international and cross-cultural issues in online collaboration. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 9780810891012. OCLC 861955584. 
  • Jemielniak, Dariusz (2014). Common knowledge?: an ethnography of Wikipedia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ISBN 9780804789448. OCLC 865452353. 
  • Leitch, Thomas M. (2014). Wikipedia U: knowledge, authority, and liberal education in the digital age. Tech.edu: a Hopkins series on education and technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 9781421415352. OCLC 879584159. 
  • Cunningham, Ward; Mehaffy, Michael W. (2013). "Wiki as pattern language". Proceedings of the 20th Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs, October 23–26, 2013, Monticello, Illinois. PLoP '13. Corryton, TN: The Hillside Group. pp. 32:1–32:14. ISBN 9781941652008. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2725669.2725707. 
  • Hoffart, Johannes; Suchanek, Fabian M.; Berberich, Klaus; Weikum, Gerhard (January 2013). "YAGO2: a spatially and temporally enhanced knowledge base from Wikipedia". Artificial Intelligence 194: 28–61. doi:10.1016/j.artint.2012.06.001. 
  • Sui, Daniel Z.; Elwood, Sarah; Goodchild, Michael F., eds (2013). Crowdsourcing geographic knowledge: volunteered geographic information (VGI) in theory and practice. Dordrecht; New York: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-94-007-4587-2. ISBN 9789400745865. OCLC 810987841. 
  • Hardy, Darren; Frew, James; Goodchild, Michael F. (July 2012). "Volunteered geographic information production as a spatial process". International Journal of Geographical Information Science 26 (7): 1191–1212. doi:10.1080/13658816.2011.629618. 
  • Doan, Anhai; Ramakrishnan, Raghu; Halevy, Alon Y. (April 2011). "Crowdsourcing systems on the World-Wide Web". Communications of the ACM 54 (4): 86–96. doi:10.1145/1924421.1924442. 
  • Geertman, Stan; Reinhardt, William P.; Toppen, Fred J., eds (2011). Advancing geoinformation science for a changing world. Lecture notes in geoinformation and cartography. Berlin; Heidelberg: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-19789-5. ISBN 3642197884. OCLC 719363243. 
  • Lima, Manuel (2011). Visual complexity: mapping patterns of information. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. ISBN 9781568989365. OCLC 664674853. 
  • Börner, Katy (2010). Atlas of science: visualizing what we know. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262014458. OCLC 476360071. 

As this list demonstrates, there are indeed legitimate reasons for many scholars to cite Wikipedia. Thanks, Biogeographist (discusscontribs) 03:33, 28 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

@Biogeographist: Really good distinction! I think the difference is that citing a Wikipedia permalink is appropriate to make a point about the information as stated in Wikipedia, but not to use as a general reference for the fact itself.
  • Appropriate- In 2017, Wikipedia's example article identified France as the largest EU country.[4]
  • Inappropriate - France as the largest EU country.[5] (correct reference should be this.[6])
  • Appropriate - The hippocampus was named after its resemblance to the seahorse.[7]
  • Inappropriate - The hippocampus was named after its resemblance to the seahorse.[8]
This is probably perticularly relevent for legal papers using the definition on a Wikipedia page to set a legal precedent.[9] T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 12:59, 28 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

Example references

  1. "Ionosphere, In: Wikipedia". San Francisco, California: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. August 29, 2012. Retrieved 2012-08-31.
  2. Wright, Marion; Skaggs, William; Nielsen, Finn Årup. "The Cerebellum". WikiJournal of Medicine 3 (1). doi:10.15347/wjm/2016.001. https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Medicine/The_Cerebellum. 
  3. Cerebellum. (2017, May 23). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 06:30, May 25, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cerebellum&oldid=781821749
  4. France. (2017, May 25). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 12:51, May 28, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=France&oldid=782200654
  5. France. (2017, May 25). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 12:51, May 28, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=France&oldid=782200654
  6. "Europa Official Site – France". EU. Retrieved 28 October 2014.
  7. Wright, M; et al. (2017). "The Hippocampus". WikiJournal of Medicine 4 (1): 3.
  8. Hippocampus. (2017, May 23). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 12:59, May 28, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hippocampus&oldid=781796444
  9. Peoples, Lee F. "The citation of Wikipedia in judicial opinions." Yale JL & Tech. 12 (2009): 1.

Archived from meta:Talk:WikiJournal User Group

Following conversations are archived from meta:Talk:WikiJournal User Group. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 19:40, 27 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

Overview #2 of updates on Wikimedia movement strategy process

Note: Apologies for cross-posting and sending in English. This message is available for translation on Meta-Wiki.

As we mentioned last month, the Wikimedia movement is beginning a movement-wide strategy discussion, a process which will run throughout 2017. This movement strategy discussion will focus on the future of our movement: where we want to go together, and what we want to achieve.

Regular updates are being sent to the Wikimedia-l mailing list, and posted on Meta-Wiki. Each month, we are sending overviews of these updates to this page as well. Sign up to receive future announcements and monthly highlights of strategy updates on your user talk page.

Here is a overview of the updates that have been sent since our message last month:

More information about the movement strategy is available on the Meta-Wiki 2017 Wikimedia movement strategy portal.

Posted by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation, 19:42, 9 March 2017 (UTC) • Please help translate to your languageGet help

Projet Wiki for Coop grant submission

Hi every one, Just a short message to inform you about a new grant submission witch can be interested for WikiJournal User Group members. A nice day for everyone. Lionel Scheepmans Contact French native speaker, désolé pour ma dysorthographie 20:43, 15 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

We invite you to join the movement strategy conversation (now through April 15)

05:00, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Please accept our apologies for cross-posting this message. This message is available for translation on Meta-Wiki.

 

On behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee, I am pleased to announce that self-nominations are being accepted for the 2017 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Elections.

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The full schedule for the Board elections is as follows. All dates are inclusive, that is, from the beginning of the first day (UTC) to the end of the last.

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Please note that this year the Board of Trustees elections will be held before the FDC and Ombuds elections. Candidates who are not elected to the Board are explicitly permitted and encouraged to submit themselves as candidates to the FDC or Ombuds positions after the results of the Board elections are announced.

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Posted by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee, 03:35, 7 April 2017 (UTC) • Please help translate to your languageGet help
19:02, 3 May 2017 (UTC) 19:24, 16 May 2017 (UTC) 21:03, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

From the talk page at Meta:Talk:WikiJournal_User_Group

Learning Quarterly: October 2017

L&E Newsletter / Volume 4 / Issue 14 / October 2017
Learning Quarterly

Stay tuned
blogs, events
& more!

Possible next steps?

What are possible next steps for this project? Timboliu (discusscontribs) 18:18, 11 August 2017 (UTC)Reply

WikiJournal..try to achieve this...IMO--Ozzie10aaaa (discusscontribs) 11:06, 12 August 2017 (UTC)Reply
@Timboliu: In addition to agreeing with Ozzie, here are some additional suggestions of sensible next steps:
  • Get approved as a full sister project. Not a huge rush, but it would allow a lot more control over e.g. the left-hand menu, the url, perhaps some locking features for published works. Eventually I hope a landing page would be something like this draft, loosely inspired by PLOS's current landing page.
  • Keep Wiki.J.Med growing. Get indexed in Scopus and Pubmed.
  • Build the next core journals. In my opinion, the priorities should be to add two broad journals in order to be sustainable initially: WikiJournal of Science and WikiJournal of Humanities. This requires inviting high-quality submissions. As the journals slowly gain reputation, more and more submissions will come unsolicited. A main hurdle remains the limited number of editors for these new journals. An editorial board of 6-12 for each journal would help spread the labour of inviting articles and organising peer reviews from external experts.
  • Unify the journal preprints systems so that the initial writing stages are as similar as possible for the journals (will reduce admin later on).
These are only my opinions. I think we've recently done well at improving the pitch for becoming a sister project, and developing the overall structure, pillars and bylaws that all the WikiJournals would function under. In many ways, one of the hardest things in the points above is making sure we have enough core editors for each journal to make them sustainable. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 02:24, 13 August 2017 (UTC)Reply
I agree with the above. I've lately been busy with getting the latest Wiki J Med publication done, and I still need to add some material to its ethics draft. After that, I can work further on the overall WikiJournal organization. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 20:06, 13 August 2017 (UTC)Reply
Great! If I can help you with something, please let me know. Regards, Tim, Timboliu (discusscontribs) 14:13, 6 October 2017 (UTC)Reply
@Timboliu: Over the next couple of weeks I'm planning to build some of the necessary pages for Wiki.J.Sci.. I've just made a unified submission page that should allow submissions to the new WikiJournals as they start up. Currently, I think it would benefit from people inviting suitably qualified authors to submit articles for external peer review (e.g. topics not covered in Wikipedia, overhauls of poorly written Wikipedia pages, or submission of well-written GA/FA articles). Would you be interested in hunting down a couple of suitable submissions? I should have the relevant core Wiki.J.Sci. pages ready next weekend. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 05:20, 9 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

DOIs and next year's financing

I've discovered that the Crossref membership of WikiJournal of Medicine can actually be used to assign DOI codes to articles of multiple journals. For example, we can create DOI codes for the articles in WikiJournal of Science. If we want, we can assign it to the articles of issue 0, or perhaps we want to wait until a peer review system is in place.

This feature changes my mind regarding future financing of WikiJournal. Since the Crossref membership is the main cost of our funding by rapid grants, I think it would be better to apply on the behalf of the entire WikiJournal project instead of for WikiJournal of Medicine.

It's time to start preparing the grant for next year's expenses, so in any case I will now go ahead and register WikiJournal as a non-profit organization in Sweden, so that we can apply for a rapid grant as such an organization. I can take the treasurer position in the grant application, but feel free to nominate yourself of someone else too for it.

Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 19:26, 10 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

I've added the recommended DOI structuring at the Starting a journal page. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 19:22, 17 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

Expansion

Given that Wiki.J.Med has proven the viability of the concept over the last few years, I think that now is a good time to expand the sister journals. Specifically, I think that WikiJournal of Science and WikiJournal of Humanities are the logical next journals to build on. Although they have much broader scope than Wiki.J.Med, I think that having a larger possible pool of potential contributors is useful to starting up. More specialist journals could conceivably follow if the format proves popular enough. I've sent some emails around to people who might be interested in joining the relevant editorial boards, so I hope that a few people will be joining us in the near future. I've done some updates on the Wiki.J.Sci pages and plan to build the infrastructure for Wiki.J.Hum over the next couple of weeks in order to help overcome the activation energy barrier for their development.

There are a few things that I'll need some help with:

  • Since we have no advertising budget, I think that all journals should do a big social media push (though I'm no social media expert)
    • We should tweet at some of the larger academic societies, since I think they are the most likely to retweet, and would reach a larger audience
    • WikiJMed can highlight that there are 10 weeks left to get submissions in to be eligible for the prize (I've updated the advertising poster)
    • Wiki.J.Sci and Wiki.J.Hum can announce as just starting up (perhaps via a unified WikiJournal Twitter & Facebook account?)
  • Can the www.WikiJSci.org web address be purchased on the existing Wiki.J.Med. account?
  • Can we make new article submission and contact email addresses (even if they just forward to existing places)
  • Similarly, Wiki.J.Sci. will need a board mailing list (DONE)
  • Do any changes need to be made to the WikiJMed bylaws to make them suitable for WikiJSci?
  • Do we know the Non-profit organization number for WikiJournal user group yet?

I've asked Mikael Häggström for help with some of these, but any help or thoughts appreciated! T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 08:08, 15 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

Good ideas Thomas! I've still gotten no reply from the non-profit organization application, but it shouldn't be long now. I'll still be busy for some time with the ethics draft of WikiJMed, and the rapid grants application once the non-profit status is confirmed, but I'd love to help in the expansion later. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 19:27, 17 October 2017 (UTC)Reply
To WikiJMed, I've made a public mailing list for WikiJSci, and a facebook account. I've also made a private WikiJSci board mailing list similar to the WikiJMed version, and board members should have received an email link to join. I've never used twitter before, so I'll have to leave that to someone else! T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 04:08, 19 October 2017 (UTC)Reply
Looking good! I have created a Twitter account at https://twitter.com/WikiJSci - is there a natural e-mail address to use for notifications? Any suggestions, including for the long name (currently Wiki Journal Science) welcome. Presumably we should share access among the editors? Markus Pössel (discusscontribs) 17:46, 20 October 2017 (UTC)Reply
(And yes, if a unified account is needed, it is possible to rename accounts. Just give the word.) Markus Pössel (discusscontribs) 18:01, 20 October 2017 (UTC)Reply
Excellent. I's good to have someone who has some social media experience involved. I've also made a WikiJSci Facebook page at [9]. It's similarly possible to make multiple people admins of the FB page. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 01:17, 21 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

@Markus Pössel: It's Open Access week this week, so it might be a good opportunity to make a tweet or two per day about the unique features of the journal. We could even tweet at open-access advocacy groups and scientific societies in the hope that some re-tweet? Examples:

  • Is your research topic absent or poorly covered in Wikipedia? Publish open-access with WikiJournal of Science to update it.
  • Want your paper to reach 100,000 people per year? Works accepted by WikiJournal of Medicine are integrated into Wikipedia for max impact.
  • This open access week, consider submitting to a free, open-access journal like Wiki.J.Sci

I've no idea on twitter ettiquete or writing style, but hopefully the general idea is clear! T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 22:44, 22 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

Chiswick Chap, for Wiki.J.Sci

Thomas Shafee has invited me to join him to help out with Wiki.J.Sci and I'll be pleased to do that. I don't think it will be possible or desirable to remain anonymous in this role so I will work openly here under my real name, Ian Alexander. I've been editing Wikipedia for something over 6 years and I've helped to bring some 150 articles to Good Article status, many of them biological. Lately I have focussed on topics in evolution and its history. When I was working in industry I was lead author on three books on requirements (software and systems engineering), and published over 25 peer-reviewed papers in that domain. I taught many training courses in industry and gave numerous seminars whether at academic conferences or in universities in England, including Lancaster, Westminster, and City University, London where I was a visiting research fellow. My first degree was in natural sciences, and as far as commissioning articles is concerned, I am most interested in improving coverage in biology articles, but am happy to assist in other areas including engineering. Chiswick Chap (discusscontribs) 13:30, 21 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

@Chiswick Chap: In addition to formally supporting your joining the Wiki.J.Sci board, I just wanted to add an extra note to say that I appreciate the significance to relinquishing your anonymity. I realise that it can be a significant change, but I think worthwhile for an endeavour like this. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 03:31, 26 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

Join

I'd like to join. :) Megalibrarygirl (discusscontribs) 17:15, 24 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

@Megalibrarygirl: Thanks for your joining the Wiki.J.Hum. editorial board. I'm looking forward to seeing the Humanities journal take off! T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 03:33, 26 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

Draft of budget grant

I've now prepared a draft of the grant application for running this project through 2018: Meta:Grants:Project/Rapid/WikiJournal 2018. Feel free to add ideas and comments. On a side not I'd like to inform that WikiJournal is now a registered non-profit organization in Sweden, since October 23. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 19:43, 27 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

I've now submitted the grant application. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 06:08, 14 November 2017 (UTC)Reply

WikiJournal as "publisher"

Now that the WikiJournal User Group has become an organization of its own, it should now be our formal "publisher", that is, the "institution" or "society" behind each journal. Wikimedia Foundation was previously our "publisher", and is still our financial provider. An immediate use of this change is for the contract sent from ScienceOpen, which is now offering inclusion of WikiJournal of Medicine in their database. It is to be completed on behalf of the publisher, so now we don't need to have the contract formally approved by the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, which would be a much greater hassle than just signing it ourselves. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 01:57, 20 November 2017 (UTC)Reply

I think that is very sensible, and in line with the user group's bylaws. It also makes sense for unifying as much as possible thing like the preprint submission system, submission form, and the potential draft landing page. Conceivably WMF could be listed as "host" rather than "funder" if some day the majority of our funding comes from some other philanthropic source., however for now I think the wording is clear. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 02:54, 20 November 2017 (UTC)Reply

Guideline unification versus individualization

With changes being made to guidelines of the now multiple WikiJournals, I made an example of a template that allows for improvements to show in all journals: Template:WikiJournal/Peer_reviewers/Criteria. It is now in use for the "Criteria" guideline for all three existing WikiJournals:

Different journal scopes will in some cases mean that some kinds of wording will be more optimal than others in a particular field, but with some modification this template can display entire sentences differently as well. If it seems all right, I suggest we implement this type of template for all journals. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 21:09, 27 November 2017 (UTC)Reply

Notification of Past Due Reporting

Greetings, This is a notification to bring to your attention that your organization is currently past due on its required annual reporting. User Groups are required to submit an annual activity report covering the entirety of the 12-month agreement period in order to renew their status as a Wikimedia User Group. Reports must be written in English, posted to meta, and linked on the meta Reports page.

As noted on the meta Reports page, your organization’s 2017 annual reporting became past due in July. Please be sure to

  1. Post your 2017 annual Activities reporting to the meta Reports page as soon as possible to return to compliance with your Usergroup agreement.
  2. Check that your group’s page is also up to date with past report links for historical record-keeping, and
  3. Please send an email to Wikimedia-l in order to share with a movement-wide audience.

If you have any questions or need any further guidance, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Kindest regards -- DNdubane (WMF) (discusscontribs) 19:19, 29 November 2017 (UTC)Reply

Hello DNdubane,
I'm sorry for having missed to post our reports at that page. I've now added a link there to the following page: Meta:WikiJournal User Group/Activity report May 2016 to Dec 2017. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 10:48, 3 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 10:48, 3 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

Location of mailing lists

I am a member of the WikiJournal Council and an active member of the Editorial board of WikiJournal of Medicine (WJM). Till now the members of the editorial board have been collaborating excellently through a private google group, the access of which is restricted to the board members alone. There is another group which is publicly accessible and wherein other enthusiasts are free to participate. Each of the other journals viz. WikiJournal of Science (WJS) and WikiJournal of Humanities (WJH) have email lists/groups in similar manner. On the other hand, the WikiJournal Council has a mailing list with and a defunct google group wherein enthusiasts can freely discuss and collaborate.

Till now WJM has maintained transparency in all the editorial board decisions and I can vouch that how well neutrality has been maintained. I believe that the other boards (WJS and WJH) would do the same. But it needs to be discussed whether we would like to continue to have the editorial discussions privately on Google groups. The reason for the query is that with the expansion of the WikiJournal model to different specialities it is important to set norms with transparency and archival in mind. The fact is in spite of the transparency of the process so far, the private google groups discussions can never be publicly documented (other than pdf print of the email threads from individual capacity) in case need ever arises. On the other hand, till now Wikimedia mailing lists have possibly never needed to be private (I could be wrong). A consensus would therefore be needed about whether to continue with the existing model or whether to shift to Wikimedia mailing lists, possibly with certain administrative modifications, if they are feasible. I would encourage a discussion in this regard. Diptanshu💬 15:28, 9 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

I think the private editorial board discussions work well in their Google Groups, and likewise for the public email lists, so I don't think we need to shift to Wikimedia mailing lists. On the other hand, I do think we need to bring discussions to an open forum whenever we can. We can for example write "I'm forwarding email conversation to the public email group shortly unless anyone disagrees", and if we want more input we can make a short introduction and a link to the public Google Group here. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 12:37, 10 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
I agree with Mikael. I think we need to be mindful of moving conversation off the board emails where possible, but that they serve a useful function (especially now that they should be email-able by anyone). All wikijournal board mailing lists should be searcheable by board members (and audit-able by appropriate regulatory bodies) via the google group webpages (like this one for WJMboard). A public example of how searcheable is the public WikiJMed mailing list. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 09:58, 13 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

Editorial board vs Advisory board

Wiki.J.Med has set a great prototype and now Wiki.J.Sci is following trend. With 16 editorial board members, it now has more active discussions ongoing in the private editorial board mailing list/group. However, the WikiJournal model needs further strategic inputs on which the individual boards can act. The WikiJournal Council could possibly benefit from the inputs of various eminent academicians and journal personalities whom we could invite. Nevertheless, they need not be a good fit the editorial board of any particular discipline and need not play a role in editorial decisions in the context of submissions and publications. We could possibly accommodate them into an Advisory board which may or may not be journal specific. I have posted a topic at Talk:WikiJournal of Science#Editorial board vs Advisory board but the discussion can best proceed here. I would invite inputs from the participants on this issue. Diptanshu💬 16:34, 9 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

I'm worried that the creation of an Advisory Board would give the impression that people would need to be members or be able to provide credentials in order to give advice. The issue in the section above would remain, about how we can share what's happening in the private board email groups. Now that the requirements for becoming an Associate Editor have been increased, we could possibly create an new role for those who just want to participate without having undergone formal scrutiny of their identities and credentials. I'm not sure "adviser" would be the most needed additional role, perhaps just something like "participant" in order to include a broad scope of ways to participate. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 12:47, 10 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
Very good point Mikael. The main interest of the WikiJournals is that they are Wikipedia-compatible, and also Wikipedia-like to some extent. When it comes to receiving advice, we can function in a Wikipedia-like way, and we need not emulate traditional journals. Sylvain Ribault (discusscontribs) 19:37, 11 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
My instinct is that advisers could best be involved in two ways:
  • incorporated into editorial boards, but with roles limited to strategy, structure, and advice in their fields of expertise (whilst abstaining from editorial decisions such as specific article publication (like Mikael and I currently are on the WikiJHum board)
  • casual contribution via the discussion boards (like we may get wikidata experts to help with)
I'm wary of making too many layers of organisation just yet, so I think that I'd encourage participants to just provide advice and suggestions without signing up as participants. Participant lists typically go out of date pretty fast (e.g. see sign-up participant list versus the auto-generated active participant list). T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 09:51, 13 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
I agree. We shouldn't make the journal structure more complicated than necessary. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 17:02, 15 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

WikiJournal of Science can be an acceptable source in Wikipedia

The outcome of a discussion at Reliable sources/Noticeboard#WikiJournal of Science is basically that WikiJournal of Science can be an acceptable source in Wikipedia. I've made an update in its guidelines: WikiJournal_of_Science/Editorial_guidelines#Wikipedia_inclusion. I also mentioned it on its Publishing page, because I think this is a major incentive for authors, to potentially reach the sometimes hundreds of thousands of readers every month for the most popular Wikipedia articles.

WikiJSci has actually surpassed WikiJMed in this regard, since Wikipedia inclusion of material in the latter is mainly restricted to images (inclusion guidelines). Still, those underlying discussions took place before there was a requirement for at least 2 independent reviewers for each article, and when participation was much lower. I therefore think the topic can be brought up again in a near future, but I think we should first see the response to the first usages of WikiJSci articles as Wikipedia references. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 15:45, 10 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

Great news! But we should be aware of the consequence: that academics can basically evade the Wikipedia guidelines by being their own authorities. To do this, write a review article that obeys standard academic referencing practices (which differ from Wikipedia's), publish it in a WikiJournal, and then copy it to Wikipedia while citing said review article as the main (or only) reference. In my opinion this would be completely fine, but not everyone agrees. Sylvain Ribault (discusscontribs) 20:12, 11 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
Yes, but the same can be done without WJS; and is acceptable for WP. I recall several times seeing on Wikipedia talk pages something like this: ...if so, well, first publish your research in an appropriate academic journal, and then be welcome here. Boris Tsirelson (discusscontribs) 21:59, 11 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
I agree that we shall have to be very careful of people trying to evade Wikipedia's systems. We will need to ensure that any original research has the same standards of peer review applied as any other reputable journal to act as a reliable source (whether cited in Wikipedia, or anywhere else for that matter). However, that the current consensus is that our bylaws, policies and guidelines hits this mark is a good endorsement of the foundations we've built so far. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 09:28, 13 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

Learning Quarterly: January 2018


Ethics statement

Location of draft:

Reflection in bylaws and role pages

Generalization

This was started as a statement for WikiJournal of Medicine, but it seems best to have one common ethics statement for all WikiJournals. Do you agree with this?
Also, additions and corrections are very welcome. In particular, there are some headers of possible topics to add, but with yet no text. I suggest that we remove all headers of empty sections in 2 weeks, so that we can move forward and ratify the ethics statement. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 14:53, 10 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

Great work continuing to update the ethics statement. Something aggregated points discussed by bard members:
  • An Anti-harassment statement and/or a code-of-conduct statement could be added, or written as a separate page
  • Perhaps the ethics statement could be written as WikiJournal-wide, than each journal can link to it if it wishes to abide (if journals eventually really have different ethical requirements, they can add journal-specific amendments underneath their transclusion of the WikiJournal-wide foundation)
T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 00:59, 11 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
@Mikael Häggström: The current draft ethics statement allows each section to be transcluded individually from Template:WikiJournal/Draft of duties of XYZ. It might be worth keeping it all on the same page to be transcluded as a single block into each (e.g. WikiJournal of Medicine/Ethics) etc with a final journal-specific section added at the end. For example, PLOS has a statement that covers all of their journals unless otherwise noted. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 08:37, 29 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
Also, when we get membership of COPE, WikiJMed should also apply to be listed by the ICMJE using this form. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 12:35, 29 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
That might be a good idea. Still, upon accepting the duties, I think these templates ([10] [11] [12] [13]) should be used at the pages of Editors, Peer reviewers etc. and therefore it's feasible to have them as separate templates. This will also help avoiding contradictions in the guidelines. Great idea with the ROOTPAGENAME ([14]) by the way! Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 20:41, 4 January 2018 (UTC)Reply
Yes, hardly anything (apart from the journal name, which I guess is what the ROOTPAGENAME supplies) seems to be specific to medicine, so sharing is obviously a huge saving of labour. Chiswick Chap (discusscontribs) 22:33, 4 January 2018 (UTC)Reply
I now see the logic of having the 'Duties of X' sections separate be able to transclude both into the ethics statement as well as the relevant pages (e.g. /Reviewers). It maight be able to maintain if we store all the sections on the same page. I'll look into selective transclusion as an alternative implementation (see example in my sandbox here). I think this might be easier to maintain. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 02:18, 5 January 2018 (UTC)Reply
I support the solution of selective transclusion as well; whatever works to avoid contradicting statements at different pages over time. Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 20:31, 7 January 2018 (UTC)Reply
I've now moved the ethics draft to WikiJournal User Group/Draft of ethics statement so that it can be the same for all journals. Still, I haven't gotten the transclusion to work for WikiJournal of Medicine/Draft of ethics statement. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo), can you assist? Mikael Häggström (discusscontribs) 14:49, 14 January 2018 (UTC)Reply
Done. The transclusion points to the template:XYZ page, so you just need to make a redirect from the template:XYZ → XYZ. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 17:07, 15 January 2018 (UTC)Reply
Return to "WikiJournal User Group/Archive 2017" page.