2019/Grants/WikiJournals

Title:

WikiJournals

Name:

Thomas Shafee

Wikimedia username:

Evolution and Evolvability

E-mail address:

T.shafeelatrobe.edu.au

Resume:

Thomas Shafee

• CV and Linkedin

Team of 6 assistants:

• experience summaries

Geographical impact:

global

Type of project:

Research + Output

What is your idea?

The WikiJournals are a series of zero-cost, open access, peer-reviewed research journals.

In order to accommodate future growth, and analyse work performed so far, we need:

• In-depth and clean data (about WikiJournal articles, authors, reviewers, editors)
  • Assessing what metadata can be included
  • Integration with STARDIT

• Back-end efficiency improvements (improving turn-around time by ensuring key tasks are always covered)
  • Logging the manual time requirements for tasks
  • Identifying points for streamlining or simplification
  • Identifying points for automation

A side-benefit of this is that updated metadata also improved Wikidata (e.g. a peer reviewer of an article should have their wikidata item brought up to date)

Why is it important?

WikiJournals are expanding to better cover a missing piece of the free knowledge ecosystem e.g.:

• Original research projects or syntheses that are thoroughly audited to add new knowledge to other Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia.
• Attract scholars and researchers to contribute to the world of open-access knowledge in a format that they are more familiar with. The resultant information can easily be shared with Wikimedia projects, as well as with scholarly publishing in general.
• Free information aimed at specialists (e.g. WP's page on depression is aimed at a general audience, WikiJournals could publish information aimed at teachers, therapists and medical professionals).
• Recording and assessment of oral history to supplement oral citations.
• Provide a zero-cost 'diamond open access' academic publishing system for authors and readers without money for access to journal subscriptions, or article processing fees.

Altogether, this will result in improved credibility of Wikimedia Foundation projects such as Wikipedia, as well as the world of open access knowledge in general.

Is your project already in progress?

The WikiJournals are already operating, and some initial data records have been generated for newer articles, however data around older articles has been minimally updated. A scoping analysis has also been performed on what information could be included on projects and the relevant mapping to wikidata terms.

How is it relevant to credibility and Wikipedia? (max 500 words)

WikiJournals are to be a source of information for other wikimedia projects via:

• New original research information.
• Auditing the accuracy of existing Wikipedia articles, improving their credibility.

WikiJournals therefore put an emphasis on reliable sources for its articles.

Part of ensuring this is the completeness of the metadata, checking for geographic bias, identifying how to improve turnaround time, and other assessments, e.g.:

• What is the geographic of authors and reviewers
• What are the full turnaround times for the full peer review process? Does it differ depending on authors? What are the major constraints in the pipeline?
• Do the expertise of reviewers match the topics of articles?

What is the ultimate impact of this project?

• Academic-level quality assurance for existing and new Wikimedia content, enhancing reliability and trust.
• Brining the free model, openness, and hyper-transparency of Wikimedia way of working to to academic publishing.

Could it scale?

WikiJournals are intended to be highly scalable, and this project will be a key part of ensuring that facilitation that scalability.

Why are you the people to do it?

I have extensive experience in project management and data analysis

The other six participants have a wide range of experience Wikipedia, Wikiversity, Wikicommons, and Wikidata as well as experience in project organisation for other volunteer groups.

There are approximately 60 volunteers serving as editorial board members and associate editors of the journals of the project.

What is the impact of your idea on diversity and inclusiveness of the Wikimedia movement?

WikiJournals welcomes all willing contributors, and it is in its interest to engage volunteers from diverse backgrounds and experiences.

Regarding content, Wikipedia, and to a lesser extent the other WMF wikis, cannot directly include original research. The WikiJournals provide an avenue for vetting and quality-assessing original research through the established mechanism of academic peer review.

What are the challenges associated with this project and how you will overcome them?

There is a backlog of articles, authors, peer reviewers and editors with incomplete or out of data data, making analyses currently impossible. Part of the project will be to systematically audit the full dataset to identify and fill in missing data.

How much money are you requesting?

US$7000

How will you spend the money?

• US$20 per hour
• 50 hours project management (Thomas Shafee)
  • Scoping data mapping
  • collating and analysing data
  • troubleshooting emergent issues
  • summarising findings
• 300 hours data (team of 6: Jacob Naccarato, Jenna Harmon, Logan Smith, Wilson Jacobs, Emma Choplin, Joshua Langfus)
  • gathering data
  • auditing data completeness
  • Direct contacting where necessary

How long will your project take?

350 hours over 3 months (March-May)

Have you worked on projects for previous grants before?

Yes.

• Wikicite for developing R wikidata package
• Rapid grant for growth of WikiJournals