Proposal:SourceIt
This proposal is associated with the bolded strategic priorities below.
- Achieve continued growth in readership
- Focus on quality content.
- Increase Participation.
- Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
- Encourage Innovation
Summary
Many encyclopedic topics or facts are actually lacking valid references, which Wikipedia suffers from. There is thus need for a journal which would publish articles on unaddressed topics.
Proposal
Typically, this would concern what would be called original research on Wikipedia, but would not need actual research ; thus the articles wouldn't be considered as primary sources. However one can also consider such more complex topics which would require actual research, and publish them as primary sources in a different section of the project, hoping they would be picked up elsewhere.
The process would be the following :
- A topic or fact is not properly sourced on Wikipedia.
- Wikipedia contributors or readers file a request on this project for this topic or fact to be addressed.
- The project contributors contact researchers or experts in this field, who can redirect them to more expert people.
- The expert writes an article addressing the issue.
- The article is published (it may be peer-reviewed before).
- The initial topic or fact can now be properly sourced.
Motivation
Many encyclopedic topics or facts are lacking valid references. Thus on Wikipedia they are either left unreferenced, which has a bad impact on its reliability, or simply removed, which impacts its completeness.
Key Questions
I believe this addresses a different issue than Proposal:Journal (A peer-review journal to allow/encourage academics to write Wikipedia articles).
This proposal is also advertised on meta.
Potential Costs
I guess experts would have to be rewarded for their articles. Depending on the publication rate, the cost would probably be the same as for a webnewspaper.
Community Discussion
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